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The Things That Abide 



The Things That Abide 



By / 

Orrin Leslie Elliott 



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San Francisco 

The Murdock Press 

1903 






THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 


Two Copies 


Received 


JAN 2? 


1903 


^Copyright 

cfuss a. 


Entry 


XXc. No 


.rxoJvT 1 


1 COPY 


g, 1 



Copyright, 1903 

BY 

Orrin Leslie Elliott 



Prefatory 



The reconstruction of religious belief 
consequent upon the extraordinary critical 
and scientific achievements of the nine- 
teenth century is now measurably complete. 
If in this process there seemed at first only 
losses, it is now evident how little the things 
fundamental to religion and the good life 
have been disturbed. The losses have been 
really gains, in that they have served to 
emphasize and deepen the truths that abide. 
Yet the old order has yielded but slowly, or 
else, and more particularly in our roving, 
cosmopolitan West, with a flood-tide which 
has carried the younger generation quite 
over into paganism. The sudden intel- 
lectual awakening which the university 
brings intensifies the perils and distresses 
of transition. To college students problems 
of religious belief and life are either fresh, 



4 Prefatory 

insistent, and disturbing, or they are 
brushed aside as obsolete. The discourses 
here brought together have sought to ap- 
proach these problems with the frankest 
recognition of what science and criticism 
have accomplished, yet always with the 
endeavor to emphasize the abiding realities 
of the spiritual life. 

It is proper to add that these discourses 
were not worked out in any connected or 
progressive series. They have been given 
in desultory fashion, at considerable inter- 
vals of time, and to shifting university 
audiences. In bringing them together it 
has seemed best to allow repetitions both 
of thought and of language, to remain 
substantially as in the original delivery. 

0. L. Elliott. 

Stanford University, California, 
January 1, 1903. 



Contents 

r. The Things That Abide 9 

II. Confession Before Men .... 33 

III. Greater and Lesser Miracles . . 57 

IV. Tempted of God 79 

V. Life Worth Living 99 

VI. The Christian Argument .... 121 

VII. '*As Little Children'' 143 

VIII. *<LiKE AS A Father'' 157 

IX. The Life Eternal 171 



The Things That Abide 



The Things That Abide 

^ * And now abideth faith, hope, love — these 
three/' 

IN the Life of Tennyson it is told how 
^^one day the poet went off by himself 
to see an old laborer of ninety, and came 
back saying, ^He tells me that he is waiting 
for death and is quite ready. What a sin 
it would be if anyone were to disturb that 
old man's faith!' " 

A strange reflection surely! Here was 
contented old age — the fruition of a life of 
toil and hardship, but lived sincerely, in 
kindly relations with fellow man, and sus- 
tained by an unfaltering trust in the 
Eternal Goodness. How could such a faith 
be disturbed? Did Tennyson fear lest the 
patience and charity of this good man be 
dissipated, lest his honesty and uprightness 
be undermined? that there might come to 
him the temptation to do a mean and base 
act, and that suddenly, in his ninetieth 
year, the whole fabric of character built up 
through the long discipline of pain and 



10 The Things That Abide 

struggle and patient continuance in well- 
doing might topple to the ground, an 
unmitigable ruin? This was not Tenny- 
son 's thought. Nor was it this other : The 
faith of this old man is vain, his God is a 
creation of his own fancy, what he believes 
is not true; but because it means much to 
him, because he is happy in his delusion, 
because his day is done, it would be a shame 
to let the rough truth break in upon his 
peaceful repose. It was not that thought. 
There is no doubt about the final note of 
Tennyson's song. He was not thinking of 
anything that would touch one real fact in 
that old man's life. He was thinking -of 
the surging doubt so characteristic of his 
time, the resistless beating of the waves 
which had wrested from their moorings 
so many peaceful craft. He himself had 
faced that storm. He thought of the haunt- 
ing uncertainty, the blackness of despair, 
the confusion of all the new words and new 
voices that fill the world, and the long hard 
fight by which faith is won back. Of all 
this fierce battle over documents and evi- 
dences, of all the recasting of intellectual 
beliefs forced upon an unwilling theology, 
not one echo had reached this old laborer. 
For him there would not be time to find 



The Things That Abide 11 

a way through all this maze. Life and his 
philosophy of it, the growth in grace and 
the intellectual conceptions which underlay 
it, would seem inseparable. In the result- 
ing shock the permanent realities upon 
which his life had been founded and which 
he vocalized in that vivid realization of the 
Good Father and his love and care, might 
somehow be swept away. 

For Tennyson's laborer this seclusion 
was fitting; for us there can be no such 
happy isolation. There is not a single 
intellectual movement of our age that does 
not converge, sooner or later, at this point 
of the reality back of time and space and 
phenomena. There is no doubt that his- 
torical criticism has profoundly modified 
men's notions regarding the Bible narra- 
tive and the whole dogmatic structure of 
historic Christianity. There is no doubt 
that physics and biology have raised ques- 
tions about the unseen world which are 
hard to answer. There is no doubt that 
great unknown regions hitherto appropri- 
ated by Religion, and over which she had 
thrown the mantle of that inscrutable 
phrase ''the mystery of God," have been 
explored by physicist and biologist and 
the mystery rolled back. New and start- 



12 The Things That Abide 

ling questions have been pushed to the 
front. How much has the plain word of 
Scripture been overlaid by the subtleties 
of metaphysical speculation? How much 
in the plain word of Scripture itself is 
historically true? What accredits the as- 
serted communications of the Almighty? 
Is there a God other than the play of 
energy and the unfolding of life which 
physics and biology make known ? Is there 
a standard of right and wrong other than 
the surviving conventions of the race? 
Cannot life be finally cornered in ganglion 
cells, and when the brain is dead must 
not the individual life go out forever? 

God came to most of us out of a Book, 
out of a creed, out of Milton's Paradise 
Lost, out of a defining process. The Book, 
the creed, the church spoke an inerrant 
message of authority. They told all the 
story of God and man, the glory of crea- 
tion, the disobedience, the Fall, the just 
wrath of offended Deity, the doom of 
humankind, the marvelous Plan of Salva- 
tion through the interposition of the Son 
of God. Oriental imagery everywhere took 
on the garb of occidental legalism. We 
could not weigh or question. Whatever 
Book or Church said might be elucidated, 



The Things That Abide 13 

accounted for, shown to be rational, just, 
beneficent, by appeal to reason, by analogy 
to nature, by interpreting experience. But 
nothing could be hinted at as mistaken or 
untrue. We could explain, but not chal- 
lenge. Has God spoken to man? Bring 
together all Scriptural ' 'Thus-saith-the- 
Lord's." Has he interfered in the affairs 
of men? What saith the Scripture narra- 
tive? And all that the Bible story tells 
of him who ^^worketh all things after the 
counsel of his own will" is right and 
proper — even though it be the drowning 
of the human race, or the hardening of 
Pharaoh's heart, or the slaughter of little 
children, or the stirring up of the Assyrian 
Kings to enslave Israel, or the putting of a 
lying spirit in the mouth of Ahab's proph- 
ets. '* Therefore hath he mercy on whom 
he will have mercy, and whom he will he 
hardeneth. ' ' 

By recognizing an ultimate authority in 
terms of human documents or institutions 
religion became an exact science, and its 
practice arbitrary and unquestioning con- 
formity. And this unimpeachable author- 
ity it is that historic Christianity so long 
put in the forefront of its battle line. The 
distinction between ''Christian" and ''in- 



14 The Things That Abide^ 

fideP' was thus made sharp and clear. 
Honesty, sincerity, purity, — these were 
indeed Christian virtues, but in themselves 
they did not bring their possessor one whit 
nearer the Kingdom of God. Instead of 
adorning the character of the ^'uncon- 
verted'' they only made error more dan- 
gerous and damnable. The Christian 
propagandist came as one dealing with 
absolute truth regarding man's lost estate 
and the expiatory decrees of Heaven. The 
sinner must take into his system an ab- 
stract philosophy and then experience its 
prescribed metaphysical and psychological 
effects. This process was incited and 
brought to its conclusion not without acute 
psychological penetration; and Christian 
living and the highest type of Christian 
character came out of the consecration of 
the will and the faculties to the lofty ideals 
of the New Testament. But that which 
seemed so important was the psychological 
experience and the intellectual assent. 
Only two classes of persons were conceived 
of. There were those who confessed their 
sins, experienced forgiveness, and were re- 
ceived into the visible fold of the Kingdom. 
There were the outsiders, unregenerate, 
continuing in their sins, and putting off to 



The Things That Abide 15 

a more convenient season the disagreeable 
but generally anticipated duty of getting 
a final adjustment with Heaven through its 
accredited representatives. 

This highly refined metaphysical Chris- 
tianity stimulated a not less intellectually 
acute skepticism which challenged its logic, 
and pointed out the a priori improbability 
of its premises, the lack of proof, the im- 
morality of acts sanctioned by documents 
and institutions, the absence of miracle 
from the modern world, the injustice of the 
prearranged hell, the tastelessness of the 
prearranged heaven. We should not under- 
estimate the bearing of this battle upon 
the fortunes of the world, nor the service 
rendered to mankind by this vigorous re- 
assertion of the primacy of the human 
reason. Yet it was characteristic of the 
old skepticism that it did not work in a 
creative mold. It did not offer a more 
adequate explanation of the world; it left 
the world 's moral leadership where it found 
it. 

But even while the controversy raged 
unabated, the tides of human interest began 
to recede, until at last, in our own day, we 
have seen the old theology and the old 
skepticism hopelessly stranded. There 



16 The Things That Abide 

came into being, not as a criticism of the- 
ology, but as an emergence of a larger and 
healthier interest in the material world, a 
patient, independent, nntrammeled, absorb- 
ing study of the world's history. The 
center of intellectual interest shifted from 
the systematizing of what men must take 
upon authority to the search for what they 
could find out for themselves. In the rocks, 
in river beds, in fossils, in all living or- 
ganisms from simplest to complex, in cus- 
toms, habits, and laws, was spelled out the 
story and the meaning of the world. Of the 
tremendous structure reared by modern 
science it is not necessary here to speak. 
Revolutionary in the domain of its own 
subject-matter, the spirit it typifies and the 
method it illustrates have become revolu- 
tionary in every domain of thought. 

This atmosphere of earnest inquiry has 
finally brought a pleasant truce to almost 
all that was strained and shrill in the old 
religious controversies. The quiet, dissolv- 
ing force of the genuine spirit of modern 
research has been wholly soothing. The 
tone and the temper in which the old 
dogmatic metaphysics flourished has passed 
out of the intellectual life forever. Every- 
where the advance-guard of theological 



The Things That Abide 17 

thinkers has occupied new positions, and 
thither the whole army is tending. First 
of all, there has been brought about a 
candid re-examination of documents and 
institutions in the light of historical re- 
search and criticism. Little by little there 
has been a loosening of frozen creed. A 
grim, petrified Book has been resolved into 
its original elements of history and poetry, 
of prophecy and song. Believers and 
doubters have forgotten their differences 
in an absorbing inquiry into the meaning 
of its historic unfolding, its heights and 
depths, its passionate search for and reli- 
ance upon the God of Righteousness. The 
fundamental questions of God, and duty, 
and destiny have been considered anew in 
the light of psychology and biology and 
sociology and all that has to do with the 
associative life of man. 

And yet all this has not been accom- 
plished without a profound disturbance of 
the religious life. This modern attitude is 
so new, so revolutionary, that it is apt to 
fall upon the youth brought suddenly into 
its full blaze with tragic effect. The light 
is not tempered to our blinded eyes, and we 
see men as trees walking. One by one the old 
supports are cut away. With the crumbling 



18 The Things That Abide 

of dogmatic structures, all the certainty 
seems to go out of the religious 
life. The God which tradition and author- 
ity had imbedded in our intellectual con- 
sciousness grows dim and dimmer until 
some day we awake to the startling realiza- 
tion that he has vanished away. The intel- 
lect had postulated a God as the ground 
and order of cosmic unity, but the intellect 
finally fails to realize him. The appalling 
silence of the centuries is too much for 
mere intellect. We spell out the history 
of a world until it seems complete and all 
accounted for and discover no force other 
than the all-encompassing energy, no life 
that is not finally shut up in a ganglion 
cell. Yet religion has somehow stood for 
the best things and determined the moral 
leadership of the world. And so we find 
men clinging to the old formulations for 
their allegorical truth and their suggestive 
symbolism, and trying to hold on to what 
is best in life's ideals, to join with churches 
in their practical endeavors for the better- 
ment of men, and to bear with the hallu- 
cinations of the religious mind for the sake 
of the good citizenship which they accom- 
pany. But when it comes to that which 
the churches put behind all this — the God 



The Things That Abide 19 

about whom they talk familiarly, his pur- 
poses, man's dependence upon him, his love 
and care — they will let it pass as a bold and 
dizzy use of metaphor which the man of 
research, who knows what evidence is, will 
prudently abstain from. And though not 
much will be said about it, the scientist 
often understands the religionist to be deal- 
ing in a method and a kind of evidence 
which have been discredited and discarded 
in every realm of intellectual life. 

These negative and materialistic results 
of evolutionary science are not uncontested. 
Indeed, no phenomenon of our own time is 
more marked than the impetus given to 
theology by its response to the searching 
test of the scientific spirit. This new spirit 
in theology, not antagonistic to scientific 
truth, yet undaunted by it, essays without 
fear the reconstruction of religious belief. 
But however confidently we may look to the 
final result life fares on. Religion cannot 
wait. Unless religion can make its direct 
appeal and present its direct evidence to 
the human heart it cannot be a moving 
power in the lives of men. Theology and 
religious belief are concerned with histori- 
cal data and with the intellectual inter- 
pretation of fact and experience. Religion 



20 The Things That Abide 

touches the springs of conduct, and in the 
flowering of the spiritual life we find the 
measure of its reality and value. And so, 
when the brain is weary with the task of 
finding out what is saved and what is lost 
in these intellectual upheavals and logical 
reconstructions, we may turn to the things 
men live by, to the homes and hearts where 
the Christ life is emulated. Aspiration, 
anticipation — are not these the characteris- 
tic moods of our age? Uprightness, sin- 
cerity, purity, tenderness, helpfulness — 
are not these its characteristic ideals? 
Faith, hope, love — these are imperishable 
realities, the gift of Christianity to a world 
ready to die. These link man to whatever 
is eternal and beyond. These bridge the 
chasm between known and unknown. 
These do not tell what God is, how he looks, 
what is his speech; but they hint of like- 
ness, they lead out into the infinite. Be- 
lieving life cannot come out of syllogisms — 
only out of the living experience. Other 
men have agonized and prayed and come 
to themselves and seen life in its long 
reaches; they have stated and defined and 
pointed out. Have we not read their state- 
ments ? Do we not know the end from the 
beginning? How close the horizon line 



The Things That Abide 21 

seems ! How far it will stretch if we really 
go forth into the world. Reasoned state- 
ments are valuable, and they may point 
us rightly on the way ; but they are not the 
way. Life has something better for each 
of us than a mechanical outfit even of com- 
pletest truth. We have been given the 
chance to grow, to attain. To start with a 
reasoned cosmogony, with a self-assured 
metaphysics, and not aware of its limita- 
tions and contradictions — how small an 
equipment that would be at its best ; what a 
meaningless revelation of God in compari- 
son with that sight of the invisible which 
bursts upon us from the summits of human 
experience! The ^^will of God" can mean 
nothing to one who has not felt the travail 
of life. The terms of philosophy, of sci- 
ence, of theology, are mere terms until 
meaning has been worked into them out of 
the abundance of human living. 

If some one in whom you repose confi- 
dence shall say to you: This is an oracle 
of God, this is a divine message, listen to 
it and obey it and it will bring you life — 
you may listen and obey, and if it be an 
oracle of God and a divine message, the 
life will come. In some such fashion the 
message of Jesus has come into the lives of 



22 The Things That Abide 

multitudes of men and women. They have 
taken the dictum of prophet or priest and 
faithfully tried to live it. And though we 
boast much of original investigation this is 
what we individually must do in a thou- 
sand relations of life. We cannot get 
firsthand knowledge for ourselves, and we 
can and do trust those who are equipped 
for this particular task. Only we insist, 
in religion as elsewhere, that the path of 
investigation be not blocked. There must 
always remain the open road to verification, 
to the removal of incrustations, to the 
achievement of more accurate results. But 
when all is done it remains true that the 
testing of life is the great and final proof. 
Intellectual processes can correct experi- 
ence, they can give perspective and propor- 
tion, but they can never contradict the 
truth we have learned by becoming it. 

Does not a mother of insight know more 
of the nature and development of the child 
than any student can find out? Have not 
the mothers of the world reached finer 
results than any modern investigator not 
armed with mother love ? And yet the in- 
vestigator will proceed as if the mothers 
had never found out anything. He goes 
about his task as if no person had ever 



The Things That Abide 23 

observed a child before. He observes, he 
sifts, he verifies, and finally accumulates a 
succession of facts from which, with many 
qualifications, he draws conclusions. Many 
of these conclusions are what the mothers 
found out long ago; they could have told 
him at the start. But it does not therefore 
follow that his labor has been in vain. 
Although many of the mother 's conclusions 
have been verified, some have been dis- 
credited. All conclusions have been tested. 
The observations of wise mothers have been 
separated from those of less wise and less 
discriminating mothers. There is now 
some solid structure upon which to build. 

Yet in the end the psychologist must take 
the garnered experiences of motherhood 
as the choicest material of his study. And 
in considering the deepest experiences of 
childhood the insight of the mother is surer 
than the labored reasoning of the most 
painstaking investigator. It goes deeper 
than the reasoner can ever go. In religion, 
the flashing insight of the prophet, the 
moral penetration of a Jesus of Nazareth, 
illumines the unknown as the lamp of pa- 
tient, stolid investigation can never do. 
Investigation is the great corrector. It 
sifts. It enables us to separate the wheat 



24 The Things That Abide 

from the chaff. Without it we shall as soon 
bow the knee to Baal as to God. But the 
supreme insight into truth remains with 
the prophet. 

We do not assert the principle of the 
lever on the authority of Archimedes. He 
is to be honored as discoverer: we can 
verify the principle for ourselves. So we 
may honor St. Chrysostom and St. Augus- 
tine and the Nicene Council in so far as 
their wisdom justifies it. But we cannot 
settle some difficulty of our own by appeal- 
ing to what they said. The beauty of a 
pure life never fades. Its freshness is 
perennial. It will never lose its power. 
That is because it is the law of the pure 
life, its nature, just as it is the nature of 
the breeze that comes over yonder moun- 
tain. 

If St. Chrysostom spoke the deep, abso- 
lute truth it can be verified in our own 
experience. But we cannot otherwise take 
it just because he said it. John Calvin 
could see and transfix a thought of God 
which shall remain with us forever. But 
when he came to build fences to hedge us 
around he could use only the material his 
age afforded, and poor, perishable material 
it proved. 



The Things That Abide 25 

Nor in Scripture can we be taken captive 
jnst by a rhetorical figure. A Scriptural 
*'Thus saith the Lord" is authoritative if 
it works out divinely in human living — not 
because of the formula in which it is cast. 
There is a transient speech and there is a 
universal speech. Shakespeare lives be- 
cause he spoke the universal language of 
mankind. It rings true in every age. It 
brings its message of power and insight to 
every generation. If God has spoken to 
man in a peculiar and authoritative way, 
and if our Christian Scriptures reflect these 
personal communications, how shall we find 
out this fact? Not by looking for a Thus- 
saith-the-Lord tag, not by yielding our 
opinion to that of some scribe. If here 
are the divinest thoughts on record they 
wiU work out most divinely iq human 
history. 

And so, what Jesus says is no better than 
what any other teacher says — unless it is 
better! Is Christianity really unwilling to 
meet this test? Authority has done some- 
thing, the thumb-screw has done something, 
blind obedience has done something; but if 
Christianity had not met this other test it 
would not have lasted half-way down to the 
twentieth century. Those who stood near 



26 The Things That Abide 

to Jesus had their hearts and lives touched 
in a way that seldom stirs within our slug- 
gish blood; and so they were keyed to 
tremendous effort and devotion. Yet we 
can speak more confidently than they of the 
reality and worth of his message: the 
centuries of testing have not gone for 
naught. The true apostolic succession is 
the succession of human lives touched by 
faith and hope and love — keeping green the 
tree of divine promise, widening out the 
moral life of the world. 

But some of you will ask as the days go 
by, May we not still keep these abiding 
things, and yet see in that which is about 
us only the manifestation of eternal energy, 
unknowable power ? Can we not trace back 
step by step every rock and tree and run- 
ning stream, and the mind of man himself, 
almost or quite to the primal nebulae, the 
world-stuff from which everything is 
evolved, and see no God and Father, and 
no human mind apart from the bone and 
fibre which it inhabits? And if, with Mr. 
Huxley, we ' ^ cannot see one shadow or tittle 
of evidence that the great unknown under- 
lying the phenomena of the universe stands 
to us in the relation of a Father — loves us 
and cares for us as Christianity asserts," 



The Things That Abide 27 

shall we not frankly face the fact at what- 
ever cost ? Yes, yes ; let us not have any 
make-believe here. And may we not as 
frankly recognize the delights of paganism, 
the serene and peaceful flow of days when 
the long tension of ^'seeking after God'' 
is finally over, when we can surrender our- 
selves to the exquisite sensation of feeling 
our spiritual faculties dulled by reposeful 
inactivity? If there were no lovelight in a 
mother's eyes, if one did not have to stand 
by the open grave, if faith and hope and 
love had not transfigured human lives, if 
Jesus had not lived, who saw life so sanely, 
who put eternal life in terms of human life, 
who dared and trusted beyond what any 
other man had ever dared or trusted! In 
Jesus were gathered up the moral intuitions 
of the race. Some things abide as witness 
of his sway. Love has fulfilled the law. 
Brotherly kindness has expanded the life 
of men. The family affections, the homes 
where Love presides, the innocence of little 
children, the strength of resolute manhood, 
the trust of mellowing age, the sense of the 
presence of God — these are and abide, and 
these will not let die the spiritual and the 
divine within us. We must seek after God 
if haply we may feel after him and find 



28 The Things That Abide 

him, though he be not far from every one 
of us. 

If every vestige of this magnificent civil- 
ization were to be swept away, and every 
remembrance of it to perish utterly, it 
would all be potentially recoverable in the 
unsubduable spirit of man. One by one the 
elements would be overcome. Step by step 
man would find his way back up the long 
stairs of material progress. And if every 
religious institution, every rite and form, 
every Bible and every creed were to sink 
into the deepest oblivion man would find 
his God. For God would remain, and the 
revelation of Him would only await the up- 
ward turning of the human spirit. Faith, 
hope, love, — if there were a God these 
would be his footprints. So long as these 
abide there can be no dimming of the 
fundamental religious consciousness. 

The oak of a century falls in the storm. 
But oak life is not destroyed ; the acorn we 
plant to-day has just as much chance, per- 
haps more, to reach the century mark. 
There is amoral fall in our midst. Some man 
meets his great temptation, and yields ; the 
moral life goes to pieces. But purity, sin- 
cerity, righteousness have not ceased to be 
ideals, nor have they become unattainable. 



The Things That Abide 29 

Out of the framework of the religious life 
many things have gone, things on which 
true souls leaned and which were precious 
to them. To some these losses seem irreme- 
diable. It is not really so. The real things 
remain, and the soul is not less stirred and 
exercised toward its predetermined destiny. 
And life when it is sure of itself must 
have its grand credo, '^I believe in God, the 
Father Almighty '' — ^perhaps the loftiest 
flight of the human soul. We may not be 
as daring ; we can at least be as true. And 
devotion to truth will bring a recognition 
of the fundamental facts from which that 
flight was winged. Some flight will be 
taken — the triumphant note of the tri- 
umphing life. Up the ladder of the things 
that abide, through contact with other lives, 
through suffering, through endurance, 
through the deep experiences of the day's 
work, through faith, through hope, through 
love, in the footsteps of Jesus, at last we 
shall scale the heights and there shall burst 
upon us the unspeakable vision. At last 
we shall speak it, reverently but with un- 
conquerable assurance — ^my Lord and my 
God! 



Confession Before Men 



Confession Before Men 

'^ Every one therefore who shall confess me 
before men, him will I also confess before my 
Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall 
deny me before men, him will I also deny before 
my Father which is in heaven. ' ^ 

'^Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the 
least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto 
me.'' 

FRANKNESS is the highest characteris- 
tic of sincerity. And if to frankness 
there be added courage of rare and endur- 
ing quality the noblest type of manhood 
results. Its directness dissipates the murky 
odors of diplomatic fencing as the morning 
sun chases away the night-damps. Its 
wholesome simplicity has the tonic effect 
of ozone. We like to know where to find a 
man. If he has opinions we like to know 
that he will stand for them, that whether an 
ally or opponent he can be counted on and 
allowed for with something like mathemati- 
cal exactness. The world despises a dough- 
face; it applauds to the echo the man who 
has the courage of his convictions. When 



34 The Things That Abide 

a man fails to come out into the open we 
can only explain it by the weakness of his 
cause or his own pusillanimity. Certainly 
we shall put little faith in him who defends 
his cause or his convictions only in secret. 
What is any man's loyalty worth if he dare 
not avow it ? Are you a democrat, and yet 
ashamed to own your creed ? Then you are 
not a demo'crat, and democracy does well 
to commit to you neither trust nor respon- 
sibility. When the ''Round Robin" at- 
tempted to break through the red-tape 
meshes which confined our soldiers to the 
fever-laden trenches of Cuba, and when the 
War Department published Colonel Roose- 
velt's impetuous appeal from Santiago, the 
political wiseacres held up their hands in 
horror. A fatal slip for a politcian ! True ; 
but whether the people or the politicians 
control, whether he is politically rewarded 
or humiliated, frank sincerity cannot hurt 
a sincere man. To him nothing but insin- 
cerity and cowardice can be fatal. 

And if this quality of straightforward- 
ness is so important in the general relations 
of life, how much more vital is it in that 
which touches all the inner sanctuaries of 
being. What shall be said of the religious 
man who hesitates, or is ashamed or afraid 



Confession Before Men 35 

to confess his faith. Can a man be touched 
in a living way, and be ashamed of the 
touch ? Can a man be healed, and contain 
his joy? Surely confession is the least that 
can be asked of him. Surely without this 
neither intellectual nor spiritual honesty 
can exist. 

In view of this instinctive demand for 
outspokenness, and of Jesus' ringing in- 
sistence, it is not strange that the Church 
has laid tremendous emphasis upon the 
confessional. Every avenue of expression 
has been seized and made to avow the faith. 
Through genuflections and crossings, 
auricular confession, recitative litanies and 
liturgies, family prayers, grace before meat, 
prayer-meeting and testimony-meeting, 
catechisms, creeds, and sacraments, the 
Church has bodied forth its dependence 
upon, and its intimate relations with, the 
unseen and eternal ruler of the universe. 
Particularly in the Non-Conformist and 
Puritan environment, the more immediate 
background for most of us, all ordinary 
expression, conversational and literary, 
came to be saturated with the phrases of 
Scripture and with the logic of creeds and 
catechisms. 

That all these expressions are still vital 



36 The Things That Abide 

and active, that they are still bound up 
with the life and activity of the Christian 
Church the world over, cannot be gainsaid. 
Yet if we look outside the conventional 
church circles and communities into the 
larger social and intellectual movements of 
our time, we cannot but be struck with the 
sharp contrast in the present attitude of 
men toward all these confessional activities. 
We have them all, but how much less stren- 
uous the insistence. They are apathetically 
employed. Speaking broadly, a strange 
reticence has fallen upon the religious life. 
The Scriptural flavor has dropped out of 
conversation, or strikes us as archaic and 
quaint in the speech of the generation that 
is passing away. Grace before meat is the 
exception, not the rule, among those who 
call themselves Christian. Family prayers 
are unfamiliar to this generation, being 
given over to clergymen and others special- 
ly elect. Even prayer itself, as a habit, as 
our fathers knew it, seems well on toward 
obsolescence. Catechisms are relegated to 
our intellectual garrets; creeds are merely 
historical documents. And if one misses 
baptism, or is absent from the solemn cele- 
bration of the Lord's Supper, is this a 
source of uneasiness, and does he count 



Confession Before Men 37 

himself for that reason hardly to escape 
damnation ? 

There are those who regard this state of 
affairs as most alarming. It is a sign that 
the religious life is dying out. It marks 
a fatal degeneracy, a dangerous encroach- 
ment of the worldly life. Any forward 
movement must first galvanize these activi- 
ties into life. How else can we hope for 
Christian growth, or even preservation? If 
family prayers and grace before meat are 
pushed aside as old-fashioned, if the 
prayer-meeting and the public testimony 
are a burden, wherein is the Christian life 
to have any manifestation? "What shall 
we say, to young people especially, who 
come from homes which honor and cherish 
these old things, and whose religious life 
at first contact with the larger intellectual 
life of the university, is filled with confu- 
sion? 

In so far as this confusion and this dry- 
ing up of the fount of religious expression 
indicate a real lapse of ideals, a waning of 
noble purpose and high endeavor, we may 
well share in this concern. But before we 
fall into despair, let us give this modern, 
undemonstrative, tongue-tied, non-conform- 
ing Christian a hearing. Is it possible that 



38 The Things That Abide 

these formal modes of confession, handed 
down from the past, are no longer the 
touchstones of the religious life? Is there 
perhaps a reason, not dishonorable, for the 
silence and the qualm, for the lack of Bible 
phrasing, for the waning of forms, for the 
lessening burden of souls which made the 
religious man's conversation dwell so per- 
sistently upon the concerns of the other 
world? Is it possible that if, instead of 
mournfully following these dry channels, 
we cut down below the surface, we shall 
find the strong, deep currents of the re- 
ligious life flowing on with undiminished 
force? 

And first, is it not true that confession 
came to be, in large measure, a stereotyped 
thing? That which was originally fluid 
and spontaneous became rigid and fixed — 
the iteration of certain formulas, the me- 
chanical doing of certain things in certain 
prescribed ways? Now true religious ex- 
pression must be free from compulsion. It 
must be spontaneous. It must not be di- 
vorced from the real form and habit of life. 
Religious expression must be the over- 
bubbling of a life that is real and fruitful, 
not a galvanic battery charged from with- 
out. Confession may be aspiration : if true, 



Canfession Before Men 39 

it will be expressed in modesty of spirit. 
Confession may be experience : if profound, 
it will not be volnble. 

Another reason why these forms of con- 
fession have lost their importance is their 
unreality as expressions of the religious 
life. The type of piety which impressed 
itself most strongly upon the religious life 
of the larger half of the nineteenth century 
was that morbidly acute psycho-theologic 
Calvinism which fed the religious emotions 
chiefly among tombstones and in contempla- 
tion of the eternal infelicity of the wicked. 
Not merely that the other world only was 
important, but salvation was to be obtained 
by confessing to a tortuous and intricate 
metaphysics which crucified and smothered 
every healthy human emotion. Thus the 
worthy author of that once famous tract, 
**The Young Cottager," would gather his 
class of young girls at the parish house on 
Saturday afternoons for instruction in the 
catechism and the Scriptures. ''I had not 
far to look," he says, ''for subjects of 
warning and exhortation suitable to my 
little flock. I could point to the graves and 
tell my pupils that, young as they were, 
none of them were too young to die; and 
that probably more than half of the bodies 



40 The Things That Abide 

which were buried there were those of chil- 
dren. ... I used to remind them that 
the hour was ' coming in which all that are 
in the grave shall hear his voice, and shall 
come forth ; they that have done good unto 
the resurrection of life, and they that have 
done evil unto the resurrection of damna- 
tion.' I often availed myself of these op- 
portunities to call to their recollection the 
more recent deaths of their own relatives. ' ' 
And when one of the more susceptible of 
these premature saints, little twelve-year- 
old Jane, was taken sick, how adroitly this 
same hypnotic sanctimoniousness carried 
her through all the metaphysical stages of 
conversion and hastened her on to the 
grave. With what subtle acuteness was her 
own self -consciousness aroused and stimu- 
lated so that there should be detected and 
rooted out any shade of the heresy of natu- 
ral expression! 

Fortunately this morbid, gloomy idea of 
piety has passed away. The religious at- 
mosphere, so heavily charged with miasma, 
has gradually cleared itself. Thanks to 
science, thanks to the Church, thanks to the 
renaissance of healthy human emotion, the 
religious life has largely regained its 
robustness. But the flavor of the old 



Confession Before Men 41 

lingers in many of our confessional forms. 
The notion that the religious person, espe- 
cially the clergyman, is apart from life in 
its every-day aspect, that laughter and 
lightness of touch are inconsistent with the 
gravity of religion, is one hard to be rid 
of. You will remember in Caleb West, 
after the accident, how old Bowles's heart 
sank within him as he gazed upon the white 
tie of the major, and the suspicion flashed 
upon his mind that his visitor might be a 
clergyman and liable any moment to drop 
down and pray with him. How many of 
us, I wonder, recall the uneasy feeling in 
the presence of '^the minister," whose habit 
of miscellaneous praying might at any mo- 
ment give him an unfair advantage over 
us! 

There is no doubt also that men have 
confessed to preposterous things. No man 
at any time hath seen the Father. Our 
knowledge of God does not come through 
the physical senses. There is no mathemat- 
ical formula w^hich comprehends him. 
There is no chemistry which reveals him. 
He is not to be weighed in any scales. But 
man can see beyond these facts and forces. 
Something comes to him out of the stillness. 
Imagination, faith, hope, love, point to 



42 The Things That Abide 

things that transcend sense experience. Yet 
men looking with the eyes of the soul deep 
into these silent mysteries have not always 
been able to report correctly what they have 
seen. Their vision has been partial, de- 
fective. They have been too indolent, or 
too prejudiced, or too ignorant to relate 
it properly to the facts of the universe. 
And so God has been reported manlike, 
whimsical, arbitrary, contradictory. He 
has been said to do from impulse that which 
was put into the constitution of the uni- 
verse. The sinuosities, vagaries, and im- 
perfections of humankind have been read 
into the divine decrees and pronounced 
good, since whatever is of God justifies it- 
self. 

There is no doubt that the meekness of 
'*The Young Cottager" is the exact oppo- 
site of robustness; that the self-conscious 
piety engendered by its false metaphysics 
must bring the religious life into disrepute 
and under deep suspicion with normal men 
and women. Christianity has been en- 
gaged, in our generation, in a mighty effort 
to shake off these weights. Christianity 
has had to demonstrate its genuineness, its 
ability to look you in the eye, its power to 
separate itself from an unreal metaphysics 



Confession Before Men 43 

and a maudlin psychology and to appeal 
straight out to common sense in the name 
of righteousness and true, unselfish living. 
It has had to supplant the old selfish, self- 
conscious saving of the soul by the larger 
concern for individual, social, and national 
rectitude; the Miltonic theocracy by the 
Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of 
Man. 

We are not an emotional people. We do 
not wear our hearts upon the sleeve. We 
are too much in earnest, perhaps, to be 
appealed to by the dramatic side of self- 
expression. With Anglo-Saxon folk the 
deep things of life do not readily find ex- 
pression. The vision that comes to us we 
may laboriously and perhaps successfully 
communicate. But what that infinite and 
eternal relation is, how it sweeps in. upon 
our lives, how it opens to us and we to it, 
the fusing of our aspirations, our longings, 
our experiences, this can only be worked 
out in the quietness and sobriety of the 
unselfish life. Prophets and poets some- 
times touch these heights and depths, and 
we respond to the touch. But it does not 
become us to engage in wanton frolic on 
this holy ground. The deepest experiences 
cannot be shared; they cannot even be 



44 The Things That Abide 

talked about. If we say much about them, 
they may be real, but they are not deep; 
they may stir our emotions and express 
themselves in passionate ecstasy or despair, 
but they are not our fibre, not bone of bone 
and sinew of sinew. 

At no point has the readjustment of 
Christianity to life been more difficult than 
with reference to prayer. Prayer should 
be the soul's sincerest expression. Prayer 
should be the religious man's most constant 
and intimate habit of mind. Yet in nothing 
is the modern religious man more reticent. 
Is it because we should not ask God for 
trivial things? Is it because, once for all, 
in the constitution of the universe, things 
were so ordered that any petition is an 
impertinence? These questions miscon- 
ceive the whole significance of prayer. 
Certainly prayer should not be too familiar. 
"We do not need to tell God many things 
about ourselves or others. Certainly we 
must take into account the eternal order of 
the universe. But it is not the triviality 
of the things asked for, nor the intimacy 
assumed, nor the disregard of unchanging 
law, that repels : it is the immaturity of the 
spiritual sense. Have we not too often re- 
versed the Scripture statement and thought 



Confession Before Men 45 

of God as made in the image of man? To 
ask God for what we need is not improper : 
it will not offend him. We may even ask 
for rain if the soil needs it: he knoweth 
that we have need of all these things before 
we ask. But the asking is not prayer — not 
even when we add '*Thy will be done"— 
unless the soul has been attuned to the 
spirit of prayer; and the spirit of prayer 
is that we shall come into union with him, 
that we shall see the God-purpose, the 
majesty of eternar truth, the beauty of holi- 
ness, that we be enfolded in his love as the 
flower is enfolded in the sunshine. Then 
rain and drought will each be revelations 
of God's order in the world, and neither 
will disturb our communion with him. 

If we are to pray it must be in the dig- 
nity of this conception. Let the heart cry 
out: to God we may pour forth all the 
bitter and the sweet. But we must rise to 
our highest thought of God and walk with 
him in the heavenly places, not drag him 
down to the inconsequential, freakish level 
of our own spiritual confusion. We some- 
times seek the prayers of praying people 
as if there were some great virtue in mere 
petition piled upon petition. When we set 
aside days for prayer and ask the whole 



46 The Things That Abide 

world to join us, is there perchance some 
childish reliance upon the mere machinery, 
of verbal expression, some magic ascribed 
to the multiplication of phrases ? Or do we 
catch glimpses of what it is to really pray 
for some great consummation — to go about 
its accomplishment in the spirit of prayer, 
consecrated, single-hearted, lifted up by its 
nobility ? The words of ourselves or others 
may help us to wait on God ; in our highest 
moods they will often hinder. You remem- 
ber Walt Whitman's delicious revery — 

^ * When I heard the learn 'd astronomer, 
When the proofs, the figures were ranged in 

columns before me, 
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to 

add, divide, and measure them. 
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he 

lectured with much applause in the lecture- 
room. 
How soon unaccountable I became tired and 

sick. 
Till rising and gliding out I wandered off by 

myself, 
In the mystical moist night air, and from time 

to time, 
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars/' 

Long ago was phrased man's impatience 
with the best attempts to touch with words 
what the soul sees in the invisible heavens : 

*'The Lord is in His Holy Temple: 
Let all the earth keep silence before Him/' 



Confession Before Men 47 

Jesus took bread and blessed it and gave 
it to his disciples. What a world of conten- 
tion, and pettiness, and mystery has grown 
up out of this simple and beautiful act! 
^^The tendencies we have towards making 
mysteries of God's simplicities,'' writes 
Mrs. Browning, ^^are as marked and sure 
as our missing the actual mystery upon 
occasion. God's love is the true mystery, 
and the sacraments are only too simple for 
us to understand." If we let go the grace 
before meat, and if the celebration of the 
Lord's Supper loses its meaning, it is 
because the simplicity and spontaneousness 
are gone. And we need not worry over our 
defection if it is somehow bound up with 
the resolve that all our lives and acts shall 
be in His name, not merely the breaking of 
bread and drinking of wine. 

There is no doubt that over-protestation, 
instead of convincing, leads to suspicion. 
If confession were always sincere, if per- 
formance never lagged far behind, if the 
pledge to stand up on parade days and be 
counted on the Lord's side meant unflinch- 
ing courage on the field of battle, all would 
be well. But what shall we think of a loy- 
alty that needs ostentatious proclamation 
once a week to beget confidence in its gen- 



48 The Things That Abide 

"aineness? ^^The lady doth protest too 
much!" Is it not possible that too much 
emphasis has been put on the verbal re- 
affirmation of loyalty to Christ? In the 
ordinary relations of life we do not require 
or wish this reiteration. You surprise us 
by this unwonted insistence. We would 
like to assume that this deeper life has 
taken such hold upon you as to become a 
part of your very fibre. If your daily walk 
spontaneously evidences this no one will 
question your loyalty. 

Yet one would not speak lightly of 
prayer-meeting or testimony-meeting; one 
only questions the emphasis given to the 
elementary exercise of choosing sides. Let 
sides be chosen, of course; then exalt the 
opportunity for high counsels, for the help- 
ful sharing of mistakes and failures and 
triumphs, for the expression of exalted 
emotion in worship and praise. 

After all, the strain and the stress do not 
fall at the point of the prayer-meeting or 
the public testimony. In Tom Brown at 
Eugby it was a sort of supreme test, the 
turning-point in the religious life, whether 
the sensitive boy should kneel down at 
night and say his prayers before his 
thoughtless, jeering comrades. Customs 



Confession Before Men 49 

change. We are differently brought up. 
Our private devotions must be really pri- 
vate. We do not any longer choose to pray 
before windows open toward Jerusalem. 
We must really enter into our closet and 
shut the door. Yet must we face the test 
of loyalty no less than Daniel must or Tom 
Brown must. Manliness must show its 
colors, loyalty must make its confession, no 
less to-day than ever. The test that goes to 
the very foundation of things comes on the 
school-ground, in the cla^s-room, in the 
seclusion of your own chamber. Religion 
must tell upon character. And it is how 
character stands the strain of every-day 
life that manifests the real confession or 
denial of Jesus Christ. Whether you are 
a child of God is not to be shown by nerv- 
ing yourself to bear testimony in meeting. 
As students, are you honest in your work, 
and in your play? Are the helps you seek 
such as give a deeper insight into your task, 
or do they enable you to shirk? As men 
and women, are you set in the path of un- 
pretentious, straight, courageous, clean 
living, cherishing the simple, true, unselfish 
things? If religion is a synonym for 
maudlin sentimentality, if it comes clothed 
in metaphysical jargon, if its fruit is self- 



50 The Things That Abide 

conscious self -righteousness, to go about the 
quadrangle inquiring of fellow students 
regarding the condition of their souls is 
happily to speak an unknown tongue. We 
shall never meet another human life with 
any real recognition except in the realm 
of outspoken reality. TJet any who are 
puzzled by the mysteries and clashings of 
creeds and confessions try the simpler 
ground of living true — each day for its 
best things. 

'^When black despair beats down my wings, 
And heavenly visions fade away — 
Lord, let me bend to common things. 
The tasks of every day: 

*'As when th' aurora is denied, 

And blinding blizzards round him beat, 
The Samoyad stoops, and takes for guide 
The moss beneath his feet.'' 

The prayer-meeting, the Scriptural con- 
versation, the grace before meat^ — these 
have been the beautiful garments of faith 
and hope and love. They are alive with 
the tender est experiences of the human 
heart. Our fathers thought in terms of 
Scripture; perhaps we are thinking too 
exclusively in terms of phenomena. Per- 
haps some day the encrusted formalism will 
drop off and the old garments be made 
fitting. At any rate, let us struggle for as 



Confession Before Men 51 

adequate expression, for something as deep, 
and true, and vital. Let our confession be 
as real. Are we less earnest, less loyal, less 
faithful, less brotherly? If not, we need 
not worry at the silences where our fathers 
spoke so freely. 

And can we then go about our daily liv- 
ing saying little about God, and nothing to 
Him, and still confess Jesus Christ before 
men? This much is certain: If we are 
facing life with frank sincerity, if we are 
struggling toward faithfulness in duty, 
sympathy with brother man, appreciation 
of loveliness, we can no more keep God out 
of our lives than the bud can refuse to 
flower at the bidding of sun and dew. To 
believe in the human heart; in little chil- 
dren; in the sunshine; in love and its 
regenerating touch ; in the life everlastingly 
loving and true; in the ministry of truth: 
no man can shut God out of his heart who 
thus believes. If one does not see that for 
this cause Jesus Christ was born, that this 
is the revelation of God to us, that on this 
highest ground of human aspiration Jesus 
has planted his banner, that his life and 
his personality have been the rallying-point 
for nineteen hundred years for the highest 
moral enthusiasm and the hio^hest moral 



52 The Things That Abide 

purpose of the world — why, it is a pity. 
Perhaps the creeds and the catechisms, the 
genuflections and the unreal testimonies, 
have had their part in obscuring the vision. 
At any rate, God can wait, and Jesus can 
wait, for the recognition. 

The more we study the life of Jesus the 
more, I believe, shall we find it the embodi- 
ment of this transcendent ideal. Every 
impulse that moves us toward manly think- 
ing and doing, every breath of sympathy 
that wafts us into accord with nature and 
humanity, every lofty vision that presses 
its way into our hearts — all bring us, 
whether we will or no, nearer to Jesus 
Christ, a herald of good tidings, crucified 
in Jerusalem nineteen hundred years ago, 
who, being dead, yet liveth. Sometime we 
shall not doubt this. Sometime we shall 
recognize that he openeth the way. If we 
are reverent, single-minded, simple-hearted, 
thirsting for righteousness, we are follow- 
ers of him. Sometime we shall recognize 
and own that leadership — not perhaps with 
shoutings and emotional outbursts, cer- 
tainly not in the petrified phrases of dead 
theologies, but without cant or affectation, 
familiarly though not vulgarly, gladly. In 
the solemn litanies of the Church, in those 



Confession Before Men 53 

voicings of deep, universal experience in 
Psalmist and poet, in our own words when 
words count, in deeds always, we shall join 
the great swelling chorus of the ages, 
' ' Grlory to God in the highest, and on earth 
peace, good will towards men." 



Greater and Lesser Miracles 



Greater and Lesser Miracles 

*^ . . . And greater works than these shall he 
do/' 

SOME years ago there was published a 
novel which attracted special atten- 
tion because of its treatment of certain 
phases of religious belief and readjustment. 
A young clergyman of the Church of Eng- 
land, single-hearted and of winning per- 
sonality, established for life in a position 
of great usefulness, stakes his Christianity 
on the reality of the New Testament 
miracles. Overborne by a mind keener 
than his own, which had produced a re- 
markable book on the History of Testi- 
mony, he comes to the startling conclusion 
that miracles do not happen. In the 
bewilderment of this conviction the whole 
foundation of the Christian Church seems 
swept away. His ministry and his life of 
service are based on falsehood. And so, 
after a severe struggle, he leaves the church 
in which he has been nurtured, surrenders 
his position and work, and goes up to Lon- 



58 The Things That Abide 

don to find, if he can, a new expression for 
religion and a new hold on human lives. 

For Robert Elsmere this new expression 
turns out to be the New Testament with- 
out its miracles, and this new hold on 
human lives centers in the personality of 
Jesus of Nazareth. The power of the story, 
we may note in passing, lies in its faithful- 
ness to the storm and stress of a transition 
which has disturbed other countries per- 
haps more deeply than our own, yet a storm 
and stress which no one has wholly escaped. 
Does its significance for us lie in that His- 
tory of Testimony, never written indeed, 
but for which modern scholarship has col- 
lected so many materials and which seems 
so destructive of the time-honored faith? 
Or is Robert Elsmere the story of one 
caught in the toils of a painful transition, 
who died before the conflict was over, and 
whose solution is as transitory as the con- 
flict itself ? Would so terrible an engine as 
the History of Testimony be content to 
destroy merely the miracles of Christianity, 
and leave the power and personality of 
Jesus untouched? 

At any rate, the miracle age has passed 
away. Whatever our belief concerning the 
miracles that have been, whatever our view 



Greater and Lesser Miracles 59 

of various exceptional phenomena of pres- 
ent occurrence, we are agreed that in all 
the ordinary affairs of life miracles do not 
enter. And this is not because the rela- 
tions of man to the forces about him have 
changed, nor that he is less responsive to 
these forces. It is that knowledge has 
increased, that effects are traced to causes. 
The mysterious phenomena with which all 
sentient life was once invested have been 
reduced to order. Lightning and tempest, 
comet and eclipse have taken their places 
among law-obeying events. The unknown 
is mysterious. The miraculous belongs 
to the childhood of the race; and the 
illusions of childhood vanish impercept- 
ibly and harmlessly in the sunshine of 
growing knowledge. The whole great 
domain of the miraculous has not shrunk 
to present proportions because we labo- 
riously disprove its claims. The fairy 
tales, the ghosts and goblins, the world of 
legendary heroes disappear in the trans- 
ition from childhood to manhood. In like 
manner the whole legendary history of the 
race, with its gods and heroes and mirac- 
ulous phenomena, vanishes in the path of 
intellectual conquest. 

And when we turn back over the history 



60 The Things That Abide 

of Christianity, there is no one who will 
deny that the Chnrch has passed through 
this childhood age. As Christianity grew 
and spread into more credulous times, and 
away from the personality of Jesus, mir- 
acles became more and more common as well 
as more and more fantastic. They were, as 
Lecky observes, a sort of celestial charity 
which alleviated the sorrows, healed the dis- 
eases, and supplied the wants of the faith- 
ful. Demons torturing the saints, angels 
ministering to them, sacred relics curing 
the sick, images opening and shutting their 
eyes — innumerable phenomena like these, 
well attested, penetrated every part of 
Christendom, without exciting the smallest 
astonishment or skepticism. When Europe 
emerged from the childhood of the middle 
ages all these miraculous phenomena passed 
away. The Church, which no longer ex- 
perienced them, gradually came to regard 
miracles as a necessary part indeed of 
God's training of the human race, but 
belonging to the childhood age and still to 
be expected only among crude and back- 
ward peoples. Belief in the miracles that 
had been and might still be long remained ; 
but even this belief has yielded to the 
imperious spirit of the age. For all this 



Greater and Lesser Miracles 61 

miraculous phenomena the twentieth cen- 
tury instinctively seeks and unhesitatingly 
accepts the simpler and more natural ex- 
planation. 

This subsidence of belief, even of inter- 
est, in the miraculous is one result of the 
marvelous intellectual activity of the 
century that has just closed. Most con- 
spicuous and most fruitful of all its 
achievements has been that study of 
natural phenomena, by the method of 
science, whereby the whole face of nature 
has been changed. Disregarding received 
or prevailing theories, yet wasting no time 
in disputation, the man of science has felt 
himself dealing with fresh and independent 
data which when arranged and interpreted 
would tell their own unimpeachable story. 
Science, speaking in her own proper per- 
son, is authoritative. To every branch of 
human inquiry the method of science has 
brought illumination; and with illumina- 
tion has come readjustment. Old concep- 
tions have given way. Old mysteries have 
vanished. Order and unity have taken the 
place of what was chaotic and arbitrary. 
In the realm of religious belief and theo- 
logical affirmation the implications of 
science have been received, sometimes with 



62 The Things That Abide 

joy, in the belief that all truth is one, or 
recking not what overturnings may take 
place; sometimes with pain and dismay, in 
the supposition that the faith once deliv- 
ered to the saints includes equally the shell 
in which it is encased, or, recognizing that 
new wine must be put into new bottles, in 
fear lest iconoclasm spill the precious wine 
itself. 

The miracles of the Church have van- 
ished. How is this profound change of 
attitude toward the miraculous to affect the 
miracle stories of the Bible, and particu- 
larly of the New Testament? The counter- 
part of many of the Bible stories is found 
in the religions and mythologies of other 
nations. Is the Bible in a category apart, 
or are its stories like the other miracle 
stories? May we apply the same rational 
tests to the Bible as to the cruder lives of 
the saints? If we value faith more than 
knowledge, must we draw back, unwilling 
to know ; or, going through to the end, shall 
we have shaken off superstition and the 
miraculous and turned our back upon the 
faith of the ages? Will knowledge become 
all sufficient so that we shall look pityingly 
upon the ignorant and the religious ? 

Eighteenth- century skepticism, concern- 



Greater and Lesser Miracles 63 

ing itself with the reasonableness of 
miracles, was able to show the improb- 
able nature of many miraculous phenom- 
ena. But reason made slow headway 
against evidence ; and if the senses can ever 
be trusted to report anything correctly 
many miraculous phenomena were estab- 
lished beyond the possibility of overthrow. 
At least the eighteenth century could not 
successfully contest this evidence; and so, 
by a feat of logic, a syllogism was evolved 
whereby miracles were declared to be a 
priori impossible — hence no examination of 
evidence was necessary. With the remark- 
able growth of natural science, a concep- 
tion of the universe, incompatible with 
miracle, came to general acceptance. This 
conception was so large, so satisfying, 
so harmonizing, so unifying with re- 
gard to all the facts of observation 
and experience, that men of science 
lost not merely belief but all inter- 
est in the subject of the miraculous. In the 
first elation of triumph scientific dog- 
matism affirmed again the impossibility of 
miracle and contemptuously bundled all 
evidence out of court. Yet when this 
theory was applied concretely to a recon- 
struction of the life of Jesus, a^s in the 



64 The Things That Abide 

attempts of Strauss and Renan, the result 
was too grossly improbable. In Robert 
Elsmere there is a returning realization 
that a priori dicta are unsatisfactory, and 
that the question, of particular miracles at 
least, is a question of evidence. The History 
of Testimony was to subject the evidence 
for miracles to a closer scrutiny, and to 
demonstrate how unable humankind is to 
report correctly and accurately the most 
common occurrence, and the overwhelm- 
ing probability of error that would attach 
to reports of events and phenomena not 
understood at the time and not written 
down until many years afterward. 

Thus far we have been considering 
miracles as transcending and controverting 
the laws of nature, as events which no 
amount of knowledge could explain because 
they violate all law. It is this theological 
and arbitrary conception of miracle which 
explains much of the long controversy and 
the tenacity with which the Christian 
Church has clung to the miracles of the New 
Testament. In the development of theology 
the miracles of the New Testament came to 
be sharply differentiated from the so- 
called miracles of the Church. Miracles 
were not to be regarded as the usual and 



Greater and Lesser Miracles 65 

ordinary accompaniment of Divine favor. 
" They were very rare and exceptional phe- 
nomena, the primary object of which was 
always to accredit the teacher of some 
Divine truth that could not otherwise be 
established." They were an essential part 
of the Mission of the Son of God. They 
were needed to establish his position in the 
Godhead. They were proof of his Divinity. 
As Son of God, and conscious of his Divine 
mission, Jesus had all powers. To deny his 
miracle-working power were to deny the 
faith outright. To deny miracles were to 
impeach the integrity of Jesus, to take God 
out of the world. If miracles must go so 
must revelation and revealed religion; and 
Jesus becomes an impostor. 

This whole conception of the nature of 
miracle and its place in the Divine Provi- 
dence is a refinement of scholastic theology. 
It is a conception which could grow up only 
as the natural began to be sharply differ- 
entiated from the supernatural — the one 
under law, the other lawless. It belongs 
to an age which believes, to quote the 
author of ''God in His World,'' in a sus- 
pended judgment and a postponed heaven 
— in a God who keeps his place while men 
keep theirs. It is the triumph of the mill- 



66 The Things That Abide 

tant faith of our own time to have restored 
belief in the immanence of God: God in 
his world, not separated from it. The 
other notion came in when the hand of God, 
the Divine, was not recognized in ordinary- 
things. Men saw God only in the abnormal 
and mysterious. But science has steadily 
pushed forward its conception of unvary- 
ing law; and the whole phenomena of the 
universe is again advanced to that height 
where God was thought to dwell in unap- 
proachable silence, broken only when he 
overturned a law he had made. 

To Christ's contemporaries the wonder- 
working power was the common possession 
of all the prophets. Everywhere they rec- 
ognized the immediate action of God. The 
unusual and extraordinary did not surprise 
them; but the key to the use of these 
powers was given only to the special ser- 
vants and messengers of Jehovah. That 
the personality of Jesus was unusual goes 
^without saying. That his power over 
nature, and over men, exceeded that of 
those who crowded around, that its expres- 
sion was sometimes beyond their power to 
understand, is self-evident. Yet if one will 
read the New Testament story, having in 
mind the ^'evidential" character of its 



Greater and Lesser Miractes 67 

miracles, he will be surprised at the little 
stress laid upon them. These incidental 
accompaniments of his daily round of 
doing good, these, to his biographers, 
natural and spontaneous signs and won- 
ders, nowhere are these made to over- 
shadow the deeper message he was trying 
to impart. 

But to the dogmatic age which succeeded 
all this had a very different meaning. To 
come into the world in defiance of ordinary 
physiological laws, to walk upon water, to 
reappear after death in the physical body 
— these somehow gave an approximate idea 
and explanation of one who was trans- 
cendent and the Saviour of the world. To 
come into the world by miracle — this 
seemed to exalt the babe in Bethlehem and 
prove his heavenly origin; to us there is 
nothing more sacred than motherhood in 
the divinely appointed way, and the divine 
breathing upon childhood is a ceaseless and 
uninterrupted process. To walk upon 
water, and to cast out devils — ^what could 
more evidence the Messiahship ? To us they 
would only rank Jesus among the sooth- 
sayers: even Beelzebub could cast out 
devils ! 

The miracle stories of the New Testa- 



68 The Things That Abide 

ment are different from the cruder mir- 
acles of the church because they are differ- 
ent. They belong to a soberer time, to a 
simpler life. They are imbedded in deep 
earnestness and sincere worship. They are 
organic but minor parts of an artless nar- 
rative, and no undue emphasis is con- 
sciously put upon them. The synoptic 
writers were not scientists nor gifted with 
great psychological penetration. If some- 
thing which the larger truth of our own 
age will not permit us to receive is inex- 
tricably mixed up in the account, we may 
still feel that the atmosphere out of which 
it comes is permeated with that illumina- 
tion we have been so slow to discover — the 
harmony and union of the natural and the 
supernatural, the immanence of God. The 
Gospel narrative has this perfectness: the 
spirit is wholly attuned to the divine har- 
monies. No extravagantest fancy of 
mediaeval art ever filled out the significance 
of the birth in Bethlehem. Dogmatic 
denial of the Gospel and dogmatic formu- 
lation of incarnation are alike in that they 
coarsely blot out of the picture all that is 
sweet and heavenly. And so we go back to 
the simple Gospel story, in its incompar- 
able setting, with no concern as to what 



Greater and Lesser Miracles 69 

History or Testimony may say, for the 
spirit and the message are there unchange- 
able f orevermore. 

But when it is assumed that the unusual 
and extraordinary in the New Testament 
narrative must altogether pass away, that 
we must reject everything we cannot under- 
stand, we shall not necessarily be con- 
vinced. This much must be granted: a 
colder age and sterner climate, out of touch 
with oriental warmth and imagery, has 
laid a wholly wrong emphasis upon the 
miracle stories of the Gospels. Belief in 
miracle as a contortion, as an assault of 
the supernatural upon the natural world, 
inevitably fades as the antagonism between 
natural and supernatural itself passes 
away. Everything is not therefore reduced 
to material terms. The dogmatism of a 
scientific age is itself giving way. We are 
not now so sure that every law has been 
found or that all phenomena will yield to 
our retorts and crucibles. The appropriate 
modesty of science, of asking every phe- 
nomenon what it has to tell, is being ex- 
hibited once more toward phenomena too 
hastily dismissed with contempt. We are 
perhaps on the verge of discoveries of per- 
manent value in a realm long given over 



70 The Things That Abide 

to the charlatan and the impostor. The 
residuum of truth in the soothsayer's art, 
the unexplaiDcd marvels of sub-conscious 
activity — some unveiling of the unseen may 
await the patient unraveling of the future. 
Yet when the shock of such possibilities 
seems too great for the anchor of faith, 
there are some things we dare affirm. Jesus 
of Nazareth was no juggler. His powers 
over nature and above nature, if such they 
were, were not powers of darkness. They 
had nothing in common, in spirit or in 
source, with the spirit-rapping, or table- 
tipping, or sleight-of-hand, of the modern 
soothsayer. Jesus had no trick which he 
took care not to reveal to his disciples. 
"What he did was not done in secret or 
through incantation. Whatever he did was 
as spontaneous as the sunlight, as fragrant 
as the summer dew. "Whatever he did was 
the spontaneous expression of an intrepid 
simplicity. Jesus exhibited proofs of his 
Divinity, not in the strangeness and dis- 
similarity of his birth, not in thaumatur- 
gical feats, not in disregard of the laws of 
physics or of growth. These are not of his 
nature, and they would not be revelatory of 
a God who works by law and by process. 
He was unusual and transcendent in his 



Greater and Lesser Miracles 71 

simplicity and spiritual integrity, in the 
directness, of his intuitions, in his sym- 
pathy, in his Humanity. 

The mysteries of darkness, of incanta- 
tion, of trance make no open door into the 
kingdom of God. I do not say it is im- 
possible to find God in such abnormal 
searchings. But the open door is other- 
where. The revelation which brings hope 
and healing and the Kingdom is in sun- 
light, in love, in unselfishness, in the daily 
doing of a consecrated life. The message 
from the eternal world is not to be discov- 
ered in the curious writings of uncanny 
hands. It speaks in the heart of man, it is 
the upspringing of the spirit in deeds of 
love and truth, it is the still, small voice 
that urges to gentleness, goodness, faith, 
meekness, self-control. In our moments of 
weakness we agonize for some ocular dem- 
onstration of the existence of God, some 
audible word from out the heavens. If this 
could be we might well doubt if there were 
a God. If God could reveal himself thus 
there would be no explanation for the cen- 
turies of silence. There is one only and 
everlasting communication from God to 
man — the touch of his nature with ours 
There is one only and everlasting God- 



72 The Tilings That Abide 

method. It is the sanest man who is near- 
est God — not the seventh son of a seventh 
son, not the Mahatma, not the overstrained 
ascetic, not the skillful manipulator of 
thaumaturgical tricks. The pure in heart 
see God, and there is no other window into 
the invisible heavens. 

Puritanism did not leaven the world and 
leave its mighty impress upon the Anglo- 
Saxon race through its hardness and its 
sombreness. These were its shell and per- 
haps its necessary environment; but they 
were also its limitation. It transformed 
Old England and built the New because the 
love of God and the simplicity of Christian 
living shone through the sombreness and 
lay behind the austerity. The faith once 
delivered to the saints has not been pre- 
served in purity because in your creed or 
mine, or any other's, it has been translated 
into correct intellectual statement; but, if 
at all, because having sown to the spirit we 
have reaped of the spirit. The law of grav- 
itation would not be shaken though a His- 
tory of Testimony should relegate to myth 
the story of Newton and the apple; no 
more can such a history strike out anything 
that is vital in Christianity or in the incom- 
parable records in which it is historically 
embodied. 



Greater and Lesser Miracles 73 

Christianity builds on greater works 
than miracles. It stands or falls by these 
greater deeds : not more astounding myster- 
ies, not more startling violations of visible 
law; but the greater works of mercy and 
peace, the transformation of lives, the 
heartening of existence, the redemption of 
the world. 

Whether in Cana of Galilee Jesus ac- 
tually turned water into wine, or whether 
John accepted a tradition which from 
some striking incident had taken on mirac- 
ulous vesture, is a small matter. What is 
important is that Matthew, and Mark, and 
huke, and John^ and Paul, and the others 
were touched by the living fire of illimit- 
able love, and were born into newness of 
life ; that down through the ages the spark 
has run from heart to heart witnessing 
anew in multitudes of lives under every 
clime and condition the everlasting verities 
of the life with God. The greater works 
have been done, not alone in Jerusalem, 
Ephesus, Miletus, Corinth, Athens, Rome, 
but in every land — ^yea, in our very midst. 
Questions of New Testament history are for 
scholars and critics; the reality of the 
Gospel can be tested here and now. 

The outline of the life in Galilee we may 



74 The Things That Abide 

never be able to fill in. What is history 
and what tradition, what is real and what 
illusory, are historical questions of extreme 
difficulty. But the message of Jesus, and 
the immortal love it revealed, can never be 
taken away. It is witnessed not merely by 
the humble men who preserved the records 
of the New Testament, but by every soul 
touched by that life from that day to this — 
by every martyr, by every sweet singer, by 
every humblest disciple. All that God is 
we cannot know — 

'^Flower in the crannied waU, 
I pluck you out of the crannies; — 
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand,— 
Ijittle flower— but if I could understand 
What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
I should know what God and man is. ' ' 

Wherever the seed of the Great Sower 
has fallen upon good soil there has sprung 
up fruit abundantly. There has been much 
stony soil— many poor harvests. Nations 
and times have seemed impervious to the 
good seed. But wherever the soil has been 
prepared there has sprung up the gracious 
flowers of charity, of sympathy, of self- 
forgetfulness — the life of the spirit, the 
Kingdom of Heaven. 

In deepest sorrow there is no comfort 
in the thought of a God who, if he would, 



Greater and Lesser Miracles 75 

could stretch out his hand and bring down 
the mountains upon us. In joyous, fresh 
life nothing sanctifies joy but that life with 
God, more demonstrable to-day than ever in 
book or past experience. The strangeness of 
miracle throws no light on the daily duty; 
but the promise of the greater works shall 
nerve us to confront with unswerving faith 
the problems of our own land and time. In 
this sign we conquer. The problem of edu- 
cation, the stewardship of wealth, how that 
brotherhood and not profit and loss shall 
be made the basis of the social order — the 
outlook may seem dark, the problem repel- 
lent. But in the promise of the greater 
works we shall go forth with joy and hope, 
and upon its efficacy here we may stake the 
Gospel and our faith in the Christ who 
promised. 

To the devout Hebrew God acted directly 
in every event of life. The snow and the 
rain, the harvest, the drought and famine, 
lightning, earthquake, dreams, visions, the 
fall of a sparrow — all manifested the per- 
vading government of Jehovah. With little 
exact knowledge, but exalted imagery, he 
clothed those unusual and more mysterious 
events with language adequate to express 
the might and majesty of the High and 
Holy One' that inhabiteth eternity. 



76 The Things That Abide 

To the tradition-fettered and unimagi- 
native theologian no act was of God unless 
it was mysterious and abnormal — outside 
of present or possible human knowledge 
and experience. 

To us has come back the Hebraic vision, 
along with that exact knowledge which 
mirrors the unchanging law that reaches 
from protoplasm to the love of God in 
human lives. And so we take back the 
word '^miracle" fraught with a greater and 
grander meaning — grander because of our 
glimpse of the all-pervading God method; 
greater, and still greater to come, because 
of the widening centuries of Christian civ- 
ilization — the leaven that is transforming 
the world. 



Tempted of God 



Tempted of God 

'* Count it all joy, my brethren, when ye fall 
into manifold temptations; knowing this, that the 
trying of your faith worketh patience.'' . . . 

^'Let no man say when he is tempted, I am 
tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted of 
evil, neither tempteth he any man; but every man 
is tempted when he is drawn away of his own 
lust, and enticed/' 

''Say not thou. It is through the Lord that I 
fell away; for thou shalt not do the things that 
he hateth. Say not thou. It is he that caused me 
to err; for he hath no need of a sinful man. The 
Lord hateth every abomination; and they that 
fear him love it not. He himself made man from 
the beginning, and left him in the hand of his 
own counsel. If thou wilt, thou shalt keep the 
commandments; and to perform faithfulness is of 
thine own good pleasure. He hath set fire and 
water before thee: thou shalt stretch forth thy 
hand unto whichsoever thou wilt. Before man is 
life and death; and whichsoever he liketh it shall 
be given him. For great is the wisdom of the 
Lord; he is mighty in power, and beholdeth all 
things; and his eyes are upon them that fear him; 
and he will take knowledge of every work of 
man. He hath not commanded any man to be 
ungodly; and he hath not given any man license 
to sin." 

THE problem of evil is the fourth 
dimension of speculative philosophy. 
What the higher geometry is to the mathe- 



80 The Tilings That Abide 

matician, or perpetual motion to the physi- 
cist, such is the existence of evil to the 
metaphysician. To speculate upon it is 
splendid mental gymnastics; it toughens 
the intellectual sinews. To place evil in 
logical relation to the universe is the task 
we are forever attempting. Take one intel- 
lectual highway, and the calamities of life 
negative not merely the goodness of God, 
but his existence. Take another intellec- 
tual highway, and the goodness of God not 
merely counteracts, it annihilates, evil. 
Take yet another, and life is life because 
good and evil are indissolubly joined, and 
like Siamese twins the one cannot live with- 
out the other. 

So far as what we call evil troubles only 
the introspective world of the metaphysi- 
cian, or is resolved in the heavenly harmony 
of the mystic, we may be content to let it 
rest in these congenial regions of the mind. 
But there is another aspect. In the plain 
path of daily living evil is a grim reality. 
The individual must face it as a fact — evil 
propensities in himself, evil tendencies and 
results in the world, mal-adjustments which 
must be righted at fearful cost. Good and 
evil are set before every man, intermingled, 
yet eternally at war. How shall one con- 



Tempted of God 81 

duct one's self in the presence of this unes- 
capable fact? 

''The end and the beginning vex 
His reason, many things perplex, 
With motions, checks, and counterchecks. 
He knows a baseness in his blood 
At such strange war with something good. 
He may not do the thing he would. ' ' 

Is there somewhere a harmony in life, a 
height inaccessible to this strange contra- 
diction, a character-strength and sound- 
ness proof against the contagion of evil 
baciUi? 

* * Ah, sure within him and without. 
Could his dark wisdom find it out. 
There must be answer to his doubf ? 

Asceticism has answered, Yes; there is 
such a harmony. There is a height beyond 
the reach of evil. There is immunity from 
this contagion. But the world must be 
abandoned; otherwise it were an unequal 
contest. The world is in deadly enmity to 
God. Therefore leave it to its own self- 
destruction, and get you apart. On some 
high mountain, in some cave, on some tall 
pillar, withdrawn from all contact with the 
worldly life, face to face with God, in 
meditation, in prayers and penitential 
tears, in scourgings, you may escape the 



82 The Things That Abide 

evils without and wear out the evil pro- 
pensities within. 

This is the sublime protest of the Age 
of Faith against an evil-minded world. 
Meditation chastens the soul. Prayers and 
tears, at infinite pain and cost, sweep and 
garnish the house of heroic souls. Alas, 
that so seldom any noble, heartsome life 
comes in, that there is any fruitage of rich 
endeavor. Often we may fear that subtler 
and more cunning devils enter in, and that 
the last state of many an anchorite is worse 
than the first. At the moment when evil 
is supposed to be eliminated life sours and 
shrivels, and all goodness corrodes in help- 
less inactivity. 

As a formula for character building 
asceticism has passed away forever. An- 
other answer is given. The world is very 
evil, but there is some good in it. It is not 
necessary to withdraw from the world : the 
good may be separated from the evil. 
Avoiding everything that evil has touched, 
one may, in fear and trembling, pick an 
uncertain way and gain at last the good. 
Worldliness and its deeds must be shunned : 
What fellowship hath righteousness with 
unrighteousness ? If the good things of life 
are pleasant, suspect them. Dancing and 



Tempted of God 83 

theatre-going and merrymaking are marks 
of the worldly life; shun them. Is there 
abandonment and enjoyment in mere physi- 
cal life and its activities? Hold it down. 
Life is short. Eternity overshadows all. 
There is barely time to flee from the wrath 
to come. And so, little by little, the soul 
may be quarantined against the evil that 
exists, may live in its midst and never 
touch it. 

This is Puritanism with its worst side 
outward — the severe, narrow-minded, un- 
lovely aspect of that which, in many ways, 
is so fine and strong. But this man apart, 
wrapped up in his narrowness, striking his 
breast and thanking God after the manner 
of the Pharisee, drawing his skirts as he 
passes through the street, barricading all 
approaches from without the fold — this 
man's answer falls upon deaf ears in these 
times of ours. The whole spirit of the age 
is a protest against it. 

There is yet another answer. It is the 
Zeit Geist that speaks it. Men are scarcely 
any longer interested in the process of sav- 
ing their own souls. It is too small a 
matter. They want to live. They want to 
achieve. The universe is moving forward, 
and the thrill of that movement stirs every 



84 The Things That Abide 

drop of blood. To be a part of it, a part 
of the propelling force, a contributing ele- 
ment, a unifying center, is more inspiring 
than any future heaven. Where the battle 
is hottest, where life is intensest, where 
temptations are thickest, come sun come 
cloud, come life come death, there is the 
place toward which every aspiring soul is 
impelled. Something is lost in the hot- 
house. The storms and struggles also cost, 
but they bring us more. The storm may 
indeed overturn us; but if by chance we 
escape, how much stronger to resist the 
next blast. And by and by, by virtue of 
storm and stress, through the discipline of 
trial, how shall we laugh at the fury of the 
whirlwind ! If any good thing shall finally 
come to us, it will be because we risked 
something for it, because we did not flinch, 
because we stood with our comrades. 

The ascetic wanders into some lonely 
mountain, and troubles us no more save 
with those solemn confidences regarding 
the perfection he is about to attain. The 
other-worldly man remains with us, but 
with fearful, hesitating countenance. If 
he sees a certain fellow student coming 
across the quadrangle he turns the other 
way: the fellow student is a ^^hard case,'' 



Tempted of God 85 

and he will not be seen in his company. 
He will have nothing to do with college 
politics because bad men have contami- 
nated them. He will not lend his support to 
any athletic contest, for students bet on the 
game; and he must not encourage gam- 
bling. He has brought to the University a 
soul well saved ; please God he will run no 
risk of failing to keep it so. 

This man is a cipher in the University. 
If he escape being teased to death, he may 
indeed avoid some pitfalls. But his life is 
colorless, his positive influence nothing. 
Not so the robust youth. He may have his 
misgivings. He may dread the fiery fur- 
nace. Yet he will count it all joy when he 
falls into these manifold temptations. If 
life is to have any triumph he must win it 
in just such conditions. He must demon- 
strate the strength of the wholesome life. 
If politics are impure he will gird himself 
to fight the battle of purity. If athletics 
are steeped in gambling he will be all the 
more active that a manlier spirit may be 
given the preeminence. 

Shall we then seek temptation ? Shall we 
welcome evil in order that character be 
given a chance of forming? Shall we, at 
least, be indifferent to the play of good and 
evil in the world ? 



86 The Things That Abide 

This truth of the sifting power of temp- 
tation, this joyous feeling with which we go 
out to meet it, has come to us in these days 
with special force. Are we in danger of 
mistaking the nature of evil? There are not 
wanting voices to say that the problem of 
evil has at last been solved, that, strictly 
speaking, there is no evil. All things have 
their place in the economy of nature, and 
what we call evil is a working force defi- 
nitely building in the evolution of the race. 
Perhaps the invading flood of biologization 
has submerged the ancient boundaries 
between good and evil; perhaps it is only 
the pardonable exaggeration with which 
we emphasize the truth newly discovered. 
At any rate it is maintained that good and 
evil are much the same; at least they are 
complementary. As for our vices, we could 
not spare a single one of them. Were they 
gone Nature would be deprived of her 
power of punishment. Natural selection 
would cease to select, and the universe be 
reduced to chaos. ' ' There are no saloons in 
Bellevue," states the catalogue of a West- 
ern University; ^^but," it adds reassur- 
ingly, ''evil enough to develop moral back- 
bone. ' ' 

When a young man leaves home, fortified 



Tempted of God 87 

with a fine sense of right, morally braced, 
there is small danger that he will fly in 
the face of that splendid training, of the 
purity of the home life, of the self-control 
so well begun. Temptations of these kinds 
will come. The weaker men and women 
will sometimes fall under them: sad and 
pitiful is the wreck ! But vigorous, whole- 
some lives are not thus undermined. Rather 
will they count it all joy when they fall 
into these manifold temptations, knowing 
that the proof of faith worketh patience. 
It is the sifting process, the purifying fire, 
the winnowing fan. And the fine nature 
will respond. But there is a subtler 
danger. In the transition time, when old 
intellectual faiths and intellectual stan- 
dards are thrown into the melting pot, what 
is to keep old moral standards from tne 
same recasting process ? The old landmarks 
fade out, and the barriers seem to disappear 
in the subtleties of the new philosophy. 
There comes the whisper that what seemed 
evil may after all be good. How can we 
know unless we taste and test for ourselves ? 
To throw off the shackles of custom and 
enlarge the boundaries of freedom is a 
part of our mission. If we are tempted, 
we are tempted of God. 



88 The Things That Abide 

And there are not wanting those who 
stand in the midst of the ethical standards 
and safeguards of the world and say: 
These things which you love to call funda- 
mental distinctions between right and 
wrong, which you think are determined by 
an eternal and ultimate standard, are in 
reality merely the surviving conventions of 
the race. They are the standards which 
other men have made for themselves. Why 
should they be imposed on you ? They have 
not always been what they now are. They 
are not the same everywhere. What is 
right in one land and time is wrong in 
another. Why should you be bound to 
observe these irrational conventions ? Shall 
you not demand freedom to follow out your 
own ethical ideals? The restrictions im- 
posed upon you were made for children. 
You are grown men and women, and must 
be trusted to know what is right for your- 
selves. All these powers and impulses 
which you possess are God-given ; they are 
meant for your use and pleasure. Your 
friendships call for this indulgence, your 
social obligations for that, your appetites 
for this other. Shall the conventions of a 
fading civilization — old wives' fables — 
paralyze your freedom? There is new 



Tempted of God 89 

light ahead. The spirit of progress beckons 
you on. You are tempted of God. 

Are there any among us who have heard 
these voices ? Happy if the sharp thrust of 
the apostle rouses our numbed senses before 
it is too late : ' ' Every man is tempted when 
he is drawn away of his own lust, and 
enticed. ' ' 

Why is it that so many fathers and 
mothers consign their sons and daughters 
to the university with an anxiety that is 
almost anguish? They may have doubts 
about the modern curriculum, sometimes 
they are foolishly afraid of the rationaliz- 
ing spirit of intellectual training. These 
are mere surface matters. Their concern 
is for those subtler influences of college life, 
those currents and eddies into which, if the 
freshman falls, he is almost surely doomed, 
where shamming and cheating seem marks 
of intellectual keenness, where dissipation 
masks as good fellowship, where moral 
lapse is but an incident in taking life as it 
comes. If we who are of the University are 
inclined to be optimistic it is because we 
believe the tonic influences are stronger; 
but we cannot be indifferent to the conflict 
and the danger. 

And the danger is intensified by a per- 



90 The Things That Abide 

version of that which has been the chief 
intellectual distinction of our age — its dis- 
interested judgment, the ability it has won 
of studying phenomena dispassionately, of 
seeing things as they are, of judging unin- 
fluenced by emotions, will, and logic which 
would bend everything to a predetermined 
result. It is this spirit which^ making its 
way against every kind of obstinate preju- 
dice and preconception, has given us the 
splendid results of modern science and 
modern scholarship. But the dispassionate, 
passive attitude with which science prop- 
erly endows the observer modern realism 
transfers to the actor. The metes and 
bounds of the individual life were fixed 
generations ago; he is what his ancestors 
made him. Environment too is as fateful 
as heredity. And so we have exhibited over 
and over again the man of weak and im- 
potent will, the helpless victim of the fates, 
without the power of resistance or recovery 
because without the sense of personal ini- 
tiative or responsibility, drifting aimlessly 
but always down the stream of passion 
and self-indulgence. Our sympathy is sup- 
posed to be bespoken because of the good 
but ineffective emotions indulged in from 
time to time, and because the tragedy was 



Tempted of God 91 

inevitable, his fate determined before his 
birth. 

This sort of fatalism is offered as a 
soporific for an outraged conscience; and 
when the conscience is sufficiently drugged 
there is doubtless a feeling of melancholy- 
distinction in regarding one's self as the 
plaything of impersonal forces. But while 
we acknowledge the tremendous force of 
heredity and the determining power of en- 
vironment let us reassert the sovereignty 
of the will. By God's help, by man's help, 
by his own resolute self-assertion, every 
man can look his heredity in the face, can 
triumph over his environment, can make 
some headway up stream if he will. ^^If 
thou wilt thou shalt keep the command- 
ments ; and to perform faithfulness is thine 
own good pleasure." 

In this our time of mental readjustment 
we may question anew the ground of every 
ethical sanction. But while we throw these 
intellectual standards into the melting-pot 
and work out the new molds, we may test 
our life by that which is back of every 
ethical standard, and which alone can guide 
to anything worthier. Does this new free- 
dom emphasize privilege rather than oppor- 
tunity? Does it whet the appetite for that 



92 The Things That Abide 

which was forbidden ? Does it urge to sense 
gratification? Does it impel us to wound 
any instinct of affection or friendship? 
Does it accustom us to a diminished loyalty 
to our highest ideal ? Does it put us out of 
focus with the purest sentiments that 
inspire the world? Is it freedom to walk in 
heavenly places, or to feed among the 
swine ? 

Freedom is not exemption from codes, 
but opportunity to rise above the plane of 
codes. If freedom does not mean more 
of tenderness, more of sensitiveness, more 
of single-heartedness, more of sunshine, it is 
dearly bought. If life becomes more intri- 
cate instead of more transparent, it is no 
freedom that we should covet. To let go is 
sometimes necessary ; but progress is reach- 
ing up and grasping hold ; and everything 
that has meant good in our life is seed for 
the good harvest that may yet be. 

In acts, good and evil are relative terms ; 
in essence they are eternally opposite. 
What is good to one generation or civiliza- 
tion may be evil to another. This is not the 
test. The cleavage is forever between the 
higher and the lower, between the high- 
est that is within our reach and that 
which is below it. The struggle is on what- 



Tempted of God 93 

ever the plane of life we have reached. 
When our vices are ready to disappear, be 
assured we can spare them without loss. 
^^When the barbarian and the brute dying 
within us shall be wholly dead, ' ' there will 
still be opportunity for character growth. 
To one man poverty is a winnowing fan; 
but there is nothing sacred about poverty 
that we should labor to keep it from leav- 
ing us. It is not the poverty that makes 
the man ; it is the reaction against its bitter 
pressure. It is the growth within that 
saves. There is no virtue in evil that we 
should cherish a, certain amount of it in 
order to develop moral backbone; there is 
virtue in struggle, in resistance, in victory. 
Temptation does not make character, and 
he who recklessly throws himself in temp- 
tation's way may lose all he hath. We do 
well to fight evil with all our powers; 
indeed, we are not half aroused to the need 
of action; we are all too careless about 
exposing ourselves and those we love. 
Everything does not work together for 
good to those who are but passive specta- 
tors in the battle of life. It is the pursuit 
of right that gives strength, the never-ceas- 
ing effort to climb higher. Keyed to this 
purpose one may brave every temptation 



94 The Things That Abide 

that comes in his way, not like a braggart 
or a fool, yet counting it all joy because of 
its connection with the pulsing life of the 
world. This spirit carries the Salvation 
Army soldier through the vilest haunts 
untouched by the all-pervading filth. This 
armor carries a young man through the 
storm and stress of youth, makes him a 
tower of strength to all noble purposes, 
brings him unscarred through all the temp- 
tations that beset his pathway. 

To you who are students the gates of life 
here swing wide open. For you the time 
has come to eat of the tree of the knowledge 
of good and evil. Into a world of mingled 
good and evil, of splendid mountain heights 
and abysmal depths, you are to push alone. 
Friends may watch and pray, but you must 
act. Go out boldly and make your con- 
nection with life where its sweep is might- 
iest. Be not dismayed that temptations 
meet you on every hand: they will prove 
your faith. If life is finally to have any 
enduring quality, any lasting fibre, any 
persisting sweetness, it will have been 
achieved in living and struggling, in over- 
coming and conquering, through trial, 
through temptation, through failure that 
has but held us more steadily to our goal. 



Tempted of God 95 

But if in the heat of conflict you are 
tempted to let go any faith, or standard, 
or principle that has hitherto wrought good 
in the life of the world, look well to that 
which offers itself as a substitute. Will 
you be truer for it? Will the home joys be 
sweeter? Will memory's pictures be more 
hallowed? If not, it is but a mad delusion 
that you are tempted of God. Pray God 
the madness pass before some awful chasm 
opens in your headlong path. 

From a life truly lived order and unity 
cannot long be hid. Old creeds, old faiths, 
old forms of thought must be fused and 
remolded. But every earnest man may 
confidently await the reappearing vision: 

^'One God, one law, one element, 
And one far-off divine event 
To which the whole creation moves.'' 

And Browning has defined for us the 
master spirit, type of the warrior, type of 
the conqueror: 

*'One who never turned his back but marched 
breast forward, 
Never doubted clouds would break, 
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, 

wrong would triumph. 
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better. 
Sleep to wake.'' 



Life Worth Living 



Life Worth Living 

**For whosoever will save Ms life shall lose it; 
and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall 
find if 

THIS paradox of Jesus was his answer 
to the question '^Is life worth liv- 
ing ? " It is an answer which the world finds 
hard to understand. Its unconditional 
negative is incomprehensible to the opti- 
mism of youth. Even where the sharp 
struggle is on it affronts the self-confidence 
of those who will gladly risk everything for 
the prize which life seems to hold out. And 
to those who suffer shipwreck, who fail in 
the fight, for whom at last all these infi- 
nite hopes and possibilities shrink to the 
narrowest confines of a sordid world, this 
'* saving of life", by its loss is but the bit- 
terest mockery. Even where self-interest 
broadens into the interest of humanity the 
losing of one's life seems a weak and impo- 
tent surrender of that prudence which is 
the highest teaching of experience. 

This question of the worthfulness of life 

LofC. 



100 The Things That Abide 

is as old as human existence, yet peren- 
nially new to every individual experience. 
Only once is the answer nnchallenged. In 
the morning time, standing face outward 
toward the fast-coming day, life is full of 
radiant promise. The fair vision of quest 
and achievement lures us on, and in it 
there is no suspicion of the bitterness 
which, in the cloudy afternoon, shall poison 
so many despairing hearts. So infinite are 
the possibilities, so entrancing the vistas, 
that every bit of life seems royally worth 
the living. 

''The year's at the spring, 
And day's at the morn; 
Morning's at seven; 
The hill-side's dew-pearl'd; 
The lark's on the wing; 
The snail's on the thorn; 
God's in His heaven- 
All's right with the world." 

Happy if one can keep this fine and cour- 
ageous optimism to the end of life. But 
for one clear untrammeled note like this we 
shall hear many despairing voices. Life is 
full of storm and stress and disaster. Is 
not disaster, after all, the larger chance? 
Is life really progressive? Is there some- 
thing ultimately worth the fight? Can even 
the best-conditioned life, when the year's 
no longer at the spring, justify itself? Or 



Life Worth Living 101 

shall we, even the best favored of us, sink 
at last from Browning's high optimism into 
the pit of Byronic cynicism? — 

'^ Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, 
Count o'er thy days from anguish free, 
And know, whatever thou hast been, 
'T is something better not to be.'' 

Let ns look at the material basis of liv- 
ing. Here apparently everything has been 
prepared for man. All the forces of nature 
do his bidding; all minister to his wants; 
all await his penetrating and inventive 
search to render yet greater service. He 
has but to command and they obey. How 
much was done by the century just closed 
to make life more worth the living ! What 
marvels it uncovered ! What richness was 
added to the lives of even the humblest! 
What were once the costliest luxuries are 
now the commonest necessities. A Nero 
could spend a fortune upon a single enter- 
tainment — nay, upon a single dish. Yet 
there were luxuries on the Fram, in the 
icy desolation of Farthest North, that Nero 
never dreamed of. San Francisco and 
London are actually nearer in all the inter- 
changes of life than were London and 
Edinburgh a century ago. Steam and elec- 
tricity have made all the world neighbors; 



102 The Things That Abide 

and with what ease and rapidity and cheap- 
ness do these neighbors now exchange visits 
and return calls. Compare the foul-smell- 
ing streets, the impassable roads, the un- 
sanitary dwellings, the dim-lighted, footpad 
haunted thoroughfares of Shakespeare's 
London with the convenient, orderly, 
healthful urban conditions of our own not 
over-to-be-praised San Francisco. The men 
and women who witnessed the begiuning of 
the nineteenth century traveled only on 
horseback or in the stage-coach. They had 
never heard of a steamship, a railroad, or 
a sewing-machine. The favorite treatment 
among all physicians was blood-letting; 
anaesthetics and antiseptics were unknown. 
Think of the industrial, social, and polit- 
ical development of America during these 
hundred years. What fabulous mines of 
wealth have been uncovered! What cities 
have sprung up in a day! What forests 
and mountains have been subdued; what 
deserts have been reclaimed; what valleys 
have been made to yield their hundred 
and thousand fold return! 

Is life, therefore, at last to be pro- 
nounced worth the living? With all the 
primitive hardships and inconveniences 
removed, with the undoubted richness of 



Life Worth Living 103 

modern life, has content and happiness 
become the common possession or un- 
questioned goal of mankind? 

First of all, there is the denial of those 
who are defeated in this material struggle, 
who have fatally blundered or been over- 
whelmed by the. very conditions of material 
progress. What an indictment it is that 
the submerged classes can bring against our 
favored civilization ! The interest of Look- 
ing Backward did not lie in its fantastic 
automatons of the twenty-first century, but 
in its analysis of the mal-adjustments of 
the nineteenth century. All of these won- 
derful improvements are real, but they are 
not for everybody. To the man who has 
nothing the knowledge of what others pos- 
sess but heightens his misery. He has more 
unsatisfied wants. It is more difficult to 
put himself in the line of satisfaction. 
Again, our great undertakings, public and 
private, reek with corruption. What avails 
it to pull down one boss when the condi- 
tions of political life promptly raise up 
others? They are not individuals so much 
as types — fungus growths which it is de- 
sirable to remove, but whose removal does 
not cure the disease. With all our achieve- 
ments and all our progress, it is not the 



104 The Things That Abide 

added conveniences of life so much as the 
added uncertainties that impress us. Mul- 
titudes in our cities fail to find life worth 
living, though not all confess it through 
suicide. 

But there is a more formidable denial — 
the protest of those who are successful. 
*^If there were given me to choose," said 
Lessing, ' ' in the one hand truth and in the 
other the search for truth, I should take 
the search for truth." This half truth 
explains the bitter lament of those whose 
search is material success and who attain 
in life all they had set before them. While 
the quest was on, while youth and health 
remained, while there was something to do 
and overcome, they found life worth the 
living. How stale, flat, and unprofitable 
achievement turns out to be ! 

There are some whose desires do not rise 
above the stomach. Life is the gratifica- 
tion of the animal desires and instincts; a 
riot of the passions in which the strongest 
gather up the reins. Such a life is not 
without allurement. It may seem to stretch 
a rose-strewn path. Music and mirth 
sound from its sylvan shades. In the end, 
however, self-deception is impossible. Life 
is burned out. There is nothing left, and 



Life Worth Living 105 

the victim needs no one to tell him that 
this is so. 

But life may be keyed to a higher strain 
— self-iadulgence replaced by self-control. 
A young man confronts life. His capital 
is health, a clear brain, and educational 
privileges. Absence of m^oney, influential 
friends, position, is nothing to him. He is 
scarcely aware of any handicap. He will 
win all these. Every good thing in life 
shall be his for the striving. And so it 
may. But suppose life has no larger mean- 
ing than this. Suppose these external good 
things become the measure of the value of 
life, and that to miss them is to fail. In 
school our youth will find it prudent to 
stand well with his teachers. He will 
reason that a brilliant recitation, good man- 
ners, a judicious deference to the eccen- 
tricities of superiors will stand him in good 
stead. He will see the vantage-ground of 
office. He will calculate the value of 
acquaintance, of patronage, of combination 
in attaimng his ends. His clear head, his 
far-sighted planning, his skill in manipu- 
lation, his ability to put other men under 
obligation, the power he has of punishing 
those who thwart him — all these bring him 
undisputed pre-eminence. Out in the world 



106 The Things That Abide 

this experience, this initial success, give 
him a fairly clever idea of how to strike 
the chords of larger success. He knows 
what individuals can help him, if he only 
enlist their attention. He studies how he 
can do some service to those who have the 
power of helping him, and if he succeeds 
he will let it be understood, at the proper 
time, that there is a mutual side to such 
acquaintanceship . 

And . he generally succeeds. Barring 
some slip or unforeseen loss of balance, he 
takes the place in the social, business, or 
political world which has been his goal. 
And is not this the successful adaptation 
of the individual to his environment? Is 
not this the ideal which our youth may 
fairly hold before them ? Are not these the 
winning cards in the world as we know 
it — the modern world of hard and direful 
competition ? If we move much among our 
fellows we shall find this ideal not alto- 
gether uncommon. To get what we can, to 
keep what we get — is not this quite within 
the statute? Not to be a charge upon the 
community, not to be a defaulter, not to 
violate the rules of the ring — isn't this 
about as high an ideal as the practical man 
has use for? The purely self-seeking man, 



Life Worth Living 107 

if he be really far-sighted from his own 
point of view, will reach his goal. Some- 
times he will fail; sometimes he will snc- 
ceed only at the sacrifice of his own 
moderate ideals and the loss of his own 
scant self-respect. The pity of it is that 
success so often satisfies; that the blood 
congeals, and one does not know it; that 
when the life becomes hard and unfeeling 
and coarse, one does not mind it. ^ ^Because 
thou sayest, I am rich and increased with 
goods, and have need of nothing; and 
knowest not that thou art wretched, 
and miserable, and poor, and blind, and 
naked." 

But there is a deeper tragedy in the self- 
seeking life. The higher senses are not 
completely drugged; success does not 
always satisfy. Even where there is no 
outward catastrophe, there is not less evi- 
dence that the zest of living has been lost. 
What is more pitiable than that groping 
for the lost chords of healthy human emo- 
tion through heaped-up largesses and 
coarse philanthropies? And what is more 
hopeless than resurrection from the dead 
of the larger human life crucified in the 
service of self. 

But such a career, it will be said, no 



108 The Things That Abide 

matter how it turns out, has been short- 
sighted and a mistake, even from the side 
of self-interest. The higher and more per- 
manent rewards have been sacrificed for 
the nearer and more obvious ones. Through 
some coarseness of nature, or lack of 
balance, the real resources of life have 
been neglected. Real self-interest, real suc- 
cess, is not furthered by self-indulgence, 
nor by a disregard of others. Surely 
it is now everywhere conceded that the 
ethical is in the evolutionary line of sur- 
vival, that in the game of life altruism 
loads the dice. To really succeed one must 
retain the respect of his fellows, and this 
denxand-s the cultivation of those isocial 
qualities and those larger relations of life 
which make for chara<?ter, and which pre- 
pare the way for enjoyment ^when the end 
is attained. 

To go still further; life is pronounced 
worth living in so far as pleasure outweighs 
pain. And in the ultimate balancing of the 
scales the highest pleasures weigh the more. 
The highest pleasures are not in the satis- 
faction of the cruder and coarser wants — 
not in money, not in position, but in intel- 
lectual and esthetic enjoyments, in art and 
literature, in the refined relations and 



Life Worth Living 109 

intercourse of life. In these is all there is 
in life — all its quantitative value. 

Does pleasure outweigh pain? And is 
life therefore worth the living? If we 
interrogate individual lives we shall find 
by this test that some seem worth living, 
some not worth living. Taking all human 
lives together, in the sum, is the total pleas- 
ure greater than the total pain; or, is the 
trend of life, the movement we call pro- 
gress, such that we may hope to tip the 
scales that way? 

The way in which attainment lags behind 
desire has always profoundly moved the 
poet and philosopher, and has given a 
pessimistic tinge to almost every philoso- 
phy of life. The lowest type of this pes- 
simism is that which cries, ^'Let us eat, 
drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we 
die." Again, it is held that life as life 
necessarily involves misery. It is impossi- 
ble to gather the rose without the thorn. 
The net result of life is loss; and if man 
could live up to his highest wisdom there 
would be a final end to all in a sort of 
premeditated and deliberate world-wide 
suicide. Or again, since all life is sorrow 
and pain, the search for pleasure is vain. 
The negation of desire, the absolute absence 



110 The Things That Abide 

of both pleasure and pain, is the sitmmum 
bomim. 

There are many standards and many- 
lines of conduct which seem to those who 
follow them, for a time at least, to fulfill 
all the conditions of a life worth living. 
Our problem is not to be solved by a census 
of these temporary states of mind. In 
spite of the vision of the morning we are 
sometimes content with very little. Life 
may seem worth the living when it is really 
stunted and mean. The little that contents 
us blinds us to what, dissatisfied, were the 
larger possibility within our reach. The 
first foothill fills the measure of our aspira- 
tion and outlook, and we never climb the 
heights. '^Whosoever will save his life 
shall lose it." However merry the brief 
moment, pessimism stalks in the shadow, 
and the inevitable tragedy of unfulfillment 
awaits every self-seeking life. 

The point we have reached is this: 
Human life motived within itself affords 
no basis for pronouncing it worth living. 
Does life turn in upon itself? Is there 
some standard outside of man by which he 
may be tested ? Is there something outside 
of man, kindred to him, filling his horizon, 
in whose service he may lose himself and 



Life Worth Living 111 

his small ends, yet find himself a conscious 
unit in harmony with a progression of 
eternal significance ? Jesus believed in such 
a possibility. He preached no gospel of 
renunciation, of immolation, or of extinc- 
tion. ''I am come," he said, ''that they 
might have life and that they might have 
it more abundantly." ''Whosoever will 
lose his life shall find it. ' ' When the small 
seed of disinterestedness is planted in the 
human soul there is no limit to the possi- 
bilities of growth and destiny. 

There is a kind of sleight-of-hand of lan- 
guage by which it is made to appear that 
the highest ultimate good, or, the highest 
good of the universe, or, in still other terms, 
the greatest glory of God, is also the high- 
est pleasure: therefore pleasure is the 
summum bonum; therefore pleasure or 
happiness is to be directly sought, and at- 
tainment makes life worth living. It is 
easy to lose one 's self in a language maze ; 
it is possible to make these terms mean 
anything we please. But our ideals must 
be rugged ; any pursuit of happiness which 
softens these is an emanation of the self- 
seeking life. The higher pleasures are not 
despicable; surely life will be richer when 
they are more wide-spread. But to say that 



112 The Things That Abide 

happiness flows from the ideal life is a 
different thing from saying that happiness 
is the end to be sought. So, too, the real- 
ization of one's self, in the highest ethical 
meaning of the term, is a noble deduction 
from the ideal life. It is the flavor of the 
fruit, but it is not the fruit. Life is an 
investment of the universe in us. To 
respond to the universe, to grow into the 
larger image, through the pain, through 
the pleasure, in spite of pain, in spite of 
pleasure, this is to attain the crown of life. 
*^I have been compensated in this cause a 
million times over," said Garrison of his 
anti-slavery struggle. ^^In the darkest 
hour, in the greatest peril, I have felt just 
at that moment that it was everything to 
be in such a cause." 

Human life justifies itself by its quality, 
its perfume, its essential nature, not by its 
accumulations, its felicities, its preponder- 
ance of pleasures over pains. The worth 
in life is an emanation, a fine and delicately 
adjusted temper of mind and soul, the 
unconsidered and unconscious outpouring 
of an abounding nature. If you analyze 
it, it is not there. Introspection blights it. 
The scales cannot weigh it. When you 
seek to apply the test of self-interest it 



Life Worth Living 113 

vanishes away. What would remain of 
that ineffable perfume of life if we insist 
on applying the quantitative tests of mate- 
rial treasures, or happiness, or self-realiza- 
tion. Man was not made for happiness; 
not even for self-realization. These may 
be indications along the way. But man was 
made for the immortal life. '^He that giv- 
eth a cup of cold water in the name of a dis- 
ciple shall not lose his reward." We need 
not deny him happiness, self-realization; 
but these are not his reward. His reward 
is in power, in widened sympathies and 
relations. ^'The profit of every act should 
be this, that it was right for us to do it. ' ' 
If, then, life is to be motived from without 
we shall find its gateway in self-sacrifice. 
Self-sacrifice is not the end of life — only its 
gateway. Jesus did not emphasize the 
losing but the finding. Self-sacrifice does 
not end in doing everything for others and 
allowing them to do nothing far you in 
return. Giving implies a responsive rela- 
tion. Giving one's life is not indiscrim- 
inate charity, nor the conscious going about 
to dispense good. Says Thoreau, ''li I 
knew for a certainty that a man was com- 
ing to my house with the conscious design 
of doing me good, I should run for my life 



114 The Things That Abide 

. . . for fear that I should get some of his 
good done to me, some of its virus mingled 
with my blood. ... I want the flower and 
fruit of a man; that some fragrance be 
wafted over from him to me, and some ripe- 
ness flavor our intercourse. His goodness 
must not be a partial and transitory act, 
but a constant superfluity which costs him 
nothing and of which he is unconscious." 
It is easy enough to throw money to a 
beggar; a very different thing to give him 
one tiny uplift toward a better life. Con- 
scious self-sacrifice is giving up instead of 
giving out. 

'^For this is Love's nobility,— 
Not to scatter bread and gold. 
Goods and raiment bought and sold; 
But to hold fast his simple sense. 
And speak the speech of innocence, 
For he that feeds men serveth few; 
He serves all who dares be true.'' 

Some student once figured out that in the 
whole United States there was one college 
graduate to every three thousand citizens. 
As it was near Commencement time, he 
wrote a stirring article for the college 
paper enlarging upon the mission and 
responsibilities of those who were about to 
graduate — each to become the leader of 
three thousand! The spectacle is indeed 



Life Worth Living 115 

impressive. Yet there is no disappoint- 
ment more bitter than that of the college 
graduate who goes forth from alma mater 
filled with the idea of leading three thou- 
sand, and who expects to be escorted with 
banners and trumpets to that commanding 
position. No, the college diploma confers 
no leadership, and the three thousand citi- 
zens are calmly indifferent. ^'Whosoever 
would be chief among you, let him be your 
servant. " To be the servant of three thou- 
sand — that is something to stir the blood! 
And while there may be disappointments 
and misfits, the opportunity for service is 
sure to come. ' ' Every hand is wanted in the 
world that ean do a little genuine, sincere 
work. ' ' If we suppose we can run a news- 
paper or preach sermons when the world 
is only willing that we shall dig ditches, 
we had better accept the wise old world's 
rating and see at least that its ditches are 
well dug. Plutarch relates that ^'when 
Paedaretus lost his election for one of the 
Hhree hundred,' he went away 'rejoicing 
that there were three hundred better men 
than himself found in the city. ' ' ' 

Has some one in mind that proselyting 
passion for goodness which strips life of its 
leisure, its fun, its social lubricant ? whose 



116 The Things That Abide 

devotees never unbend, who urge to Puri- 
tanic strictness, who talk audaciously of 
remodeling the world, who throw away 
every good thing to invade the Chinese 
empire or the heart of Africa? This is 
not self-sacrifice — primarily. This is 
youth — glorious, buoyant, believing, cour- 
ageous youth! Poor would the world be 
without it. It is often spectacular. It 
chooses the remote under the impression 
that the remote is most worth while. It 
must learn that nothing is quite so hard, 
nor quite so important, as to do the little 
duty well and faithfully, at home, in the 
quiet round of life. Soon enough it will 
come to the realization that in a world far 
from perfect the most that any one can do 
is very little. But not to have the vision 
of a regenerated humanity, not to see the 
City of God, not to gaze in exalted vision 
upon the fair fields and lanes of Utopia, 
and when life is young and heartsome and 
strong, not to believe that we can make the 
world over — that indeed were paralyzing 
to the good we might have done. 

'^There's but one thing to sing about, 
And poor's the song that does without; 
And many a song would not live long 
Were it not for the theme that is never worked 
ouf 



Life Worth Living 117 

Sometimes a state of absolute justice and 
absolute freedom appeals to us as the ideal 
condition of life. Every man would have 
what belonged to him. He would be free 
to make the most of himself. He would 
have opportunity to measure himself 
against his fellows, and in so far as he was 
stronger, more far-sighted, more patient, 
shrewder, wiser — in short, more adaptable 
— he would succeed. Those who were fee- 
ble, or shortsighted, or disabled, or dis- 
eased, would have their measure of oppor- 
tunity, be finally crowded to the outer rim, 
and when they could no longer hold on 
would drop into well-earned oblivion. In 
a sense we have been moving steadily in 
this direction. The century just past threw 
off many of the shackles which impeded 
this freedom of movement. It is not un- 
reasonable to suppose that both justice and 
freedom may be meted out with larger 
liberality. In another sense we are travel- 
ing farther and farther from this ideal 
every year. Man free, man realizing him- 
self, man seeking his own happiness, would 
bring us at last to an orderly world, a cold, 
insensible, inhuman Paradise. It is broth- 
erhood which forbids it. An orderly world 
is desirable. Freedom, justice, indepen- 



118 The Things That Abide 

dence, happiness, self-realization, are desir- 
able, nay, let ns hope, indispensable. But 
take out the helping hand, take out the 
love that can go down into the deepest 
depths and out to the farthest rim with 
healing and rescue, take out the spirit of 
supreme self-sacrifice — that a man lay 
down his life for his friends — and life 
would be as cheerless as the awful solitudes 
of the moon. That which gives life a mean- 
ing, that clothes it with beauty and worth- 
fulness, that sweetens these common tasks, 
is its anchorage in the larger life of the 
vast universe. For the individual this is 
to lose the strain, the pettiness, the jar and 
discord of self-seeking; to find the repose, 
the symmetry, the fusion and union with 
all that is aspiring in earth or heaven. 
One life truly lived, ^' under the aspect of 
eternity," redeems all human life, and in 
the hubbub of the day's round, with its 
cares, its disappointments, its stragglings, 
its triumphs, restores for us faith in the 
worthfulness of human life — for the indi- 
vidual, for the race, and for the universe. 

** God's in his heaven— 
AH 's right with the world ! ' ' 



The Christian Argument 



The Christian Argument 

**For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks 
seek after wisdom : But we preach Christ crucified, 
unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the 
Greeks foolishness } but unto them which are 
called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of 
God and the wisdom of God.'' 

IT is the fortune of most of us to have 
inherited the Puritan conscience. We 
may have strayed far in thought and deed, 
we may affect the more yielding standards 
of this cosmopolitan world ; yet it is not the 
same as to those in whose blood the softer 
strains have long flowed. That which comes 
so easy to many — little deflections from the 
strict line of rectitude, different standards 
for man and woman, good-natured con- 
tempt of Sabbath strictness and week-day 
restraint, unabashed levity in the presence 
of the deepest experiences of the soul — if 
we attain unto these, there is still a wrench 
to even the least of those whose blood car- 
ries a single Puritan strain. We may cut 
loose from every Puritan tradition, we may 
yield obedience to what we conceive a larger 



122 The Things That Abide 

truth, yet we shall do it with a sense of 
pain and loss not soon repaired. 

The Puritan lived in a darkened age, 
when the difference between good and evil 
was but faintly discerned. In the Puritan 
the saving elements of society gathered 
themselves together. Puritanism was hard, 
sombre, distrustful of mirth, narrow-mind- 
ed. It was also robust. It raised up 
rectitude and righteousness as landmarks. 
It associated God, conscience, duty with 
life. The life was hard-featured, but it 
was pursued in sanity and soberness. It 
was downright and earnest, and however 
the intellect was tripped and tricked the 
life was transformed. It is the good for- 
tune of our own age, by virtue of this 
ancestry and this life, to have inherited a 
body of men and women sound and whole- 
some in the fundamental sanities of life, 
religious in deep and true ways, full of 
faith and hope and love. Yet with all this 
inheritance, filled with the fire of enthusi- 
asm and purpose, we have fallen upon 
trying times. The age of faith has given 
place to the riotous age of the intellect. 
Whether we will or no we are submerged 
in an atmosphere of inquiry, of investiga- 
tion, of testing. The whole boundless uni- 



The Christian Argument 123 

verse is laid open. The experience, the wis- 
dom, the guiding-posts of the past are at 
our disposal; but we are expected to make 
the universe our own by conquering it 
afresh. What fascinating outlooks! No 
enthusiasm is so buoyant, none more thrill- 
ing, than that pure passion for conquest 
which invests the Knight of Scholarship, 
whether his quest be merely some intricacy 
of grammar or the evolution of a race. 
And no matter what religious experiences 
life may have hitherto yielded, nor what 
fortifications theology may have builded, 
it is inevitable that this quest should em- 
brace those fundamental questions as to the 
sanctions of morality, the meaning of duty, 
the nature of religion, the existence of God, 
It is not that everything held sacred will 
be questioned: that is no new experience. 
But with the bewildering rush of new 
impressions, new facts, and new points of 
view, the ground will seem to give way 
beneath the feet. All about you men will 
be making new syntheses of human life and 
finding no place in them for the emotions 
and activities of religion. It would be easy 
to exaggerate the pressure of this transition 
time, and to magnify its perils. It does not 
come to everybody. Some lives unfold as 



124 The Things That Abide 

the flowers do, gradually, imperceptibly, 
perfectly. When young people are sud- 
denly struck with grave doubt in the pres- 
ence of the fundamental problems of 
existence, it were easy to overestimate the 
depth and importance of this melancholia. 
Some disturbance is incident to growth, 
and growing pains, severe though they may 
be, need not alarm us. Yet something is 
evidently awry when a thoughtful observer, 
looking upon our community life, may con- 
clude that /^ the majority of students have 
no use for religion." 

The intellectual problems of to-day are 
not the same as in St. Paul's time. Yet 
the analogy is striking. Paul lived in an 
age in some respects the most hopeless in 
recorded history. The disintegrating influ- 
ences of rapacity, lust, self-indulgence, and 
malice were working within the mighty 
empire of Rome. The sense of a moral 
government was fading from the mind of 
Greek and Roman alike. Even in Jewry 
faith had given place to formality. The 
gods no longer concerned the Greek; yet 
there were left those who reached out after 
the larger life, and in philosophy, in art, 
in science were seeking for self-realization 
through stoic wisdom. The Jew could not 



The Christian Argument 125 

so easily throw off his vision of the High 
and Holy One; but his religious fervor 
was dimmed, and of any new manifestation, 
like Christianity, he demanded some un- 
mistakable sign of that Divine power which 
invests the oracles of God. To-day it is 
the earnestness of men, the Puritan strain, 
which makes problems of God, conscience, 
duty. It is a sign of vitality that there 
are among us so many Jews, so many 
Greeks — the one despairingly demanding 
some sign from the unseen world, the other 
seeking wisdom. 

In childhood we necessarily live upon 
authority. Not having wisdom of our own, 
we must obey the wisdom of parents, teach- 
ers, and rulers. As we grow in knowledge 
much of this authority falls away: it is 
never wholly shaken off. As members of 
families, societies, and states, our will 
must yield in varied ways to the larger will. 
No man can compass the whole of intel- 
lectual knowledge. We can apply certain 
tests of reason and comparison, but in the 
end, in innumerable cases, we willingly and 
safely rest in authority. We have not time 
ourselves to study the heavens, but we 
may become satisfied of the veracity, in- 
telligence, and general accuracy of those 



126 The Things That Abide 

who do study the heavens and announce its 
laws. In religious matters, we inherit the 
experiences of the past, and especially the 
intellectual formulas in which they were 
cast. In some form or other these expe- 
riences, together with the intellectual 
explanations of them, must be compared 
with our own experiences and brought to 
the bar of our own reason. 

The authority in religion which this 
generation inherited conceived of God as 
far removed from the ordinary phenomena 
of the world. His existence, his nature, 
his decrees, his laws and punishments, his 
plan of salvation and the etiquette of 
heaven had once for all been duly set forth 
by men especially inspired and instructed, 
and God himself had retired from that 
direct and immediate relation he had once 
assumed to his chosen people. Still, by 
petition and process, in response to prayer 
and service, he could be persuaded to in- 
terfere in the affairs of men: using the 
earthquake, the pestilence, the lightning to 
do his signal bidding, averting all these by 
special favor; striking down the wicked by 
special execution, saving the righteous 
by special intervention. Spiritual men in 
all generations have pierced these walls of 



The Christian Argument 127 

scholasticism and strayed into the broad 
fields and sunshine beyond. No generation 
has so little excuse as our own for being 
bound by this mechanical conception of 
God; yet not one of us, I suppose, has 
wholly escaped the limitations of this point 
of view. 

At any rate, our modern Jew, come to 
college halls, finds all these manifestations 
traced to secondary causes: all nature 
bound together by the chain of law; back 
of earthquake the subterranean disturb- 
ance; back of lightning stroke the sur- 
charged atmosphere; back of storm and 
wind the unmistakable barometric condi- 
tions; every manifestation of nature and 
physical life the effect of a cause which 
itself is but another effect of a still more 
primary cause. Back, back this God of 
authority goes until dimly, in the far re- 
cesses of the beginnings, where science has 
not penetrated, he may be allowed to rest 
as an unknown First Cause. Is it any won- 
der that our Jew, filled with anthropomor- 
phic images of God, is disturbed and doubt- 
ing. He will not be cheated by a shadow. 
If God be driven out of all known phenom- 
ena and superseded by this intricate inter- 
relation of natural laws, how can it be 



128 The Things That Abide 

shown that he is within the shadowy be- 
yond the originator and controller of it all ? 
Give us some sign of his power. 

Our Greek, on the other hand, frankly 
accepts the situation. He remembers that 
the lightning stroke does not turn aside 
because the good man is in its track. When 
the prayer of faith seems to have saved 
some almost shipwrecked crew, he recalls 
other tempest-tossed ships which went 
down for all their prayers and tears. The 
loss of that immortal hope of the ages may 
or may not be painful. At any rate, to all 
intents and purposes, the universe runs 
itself, and has adapted itself out of nothing 
or next to nothing. Nevertheless it is a 
wonderful adaptation. The birds do not 
sing less sweetly because they represent 
an original variation from an elemental 
sensitiveness. If any man cares to call 
this developing principle God, well and 
good. But the Greek will free himself from 
religious veiling and see things directly in 
their simple relations of cause and effect. 
He will seek wisdom, the knowledge that 
makes wise, the secrets of nature, the new 
synthesis of the world. Eeligion is foolish- 
ness, but wisdom may well call for the 
highest devotion of man. 



The Christian Argument 129 

Strange answer that Paul gave to all 
that questioning and indifference. Stranger 
yet, that Christianity has no other answer 
to the not less eager, perhaps more despair- 
ing questioning of to-day. To both Jew 
and Greek, in the ancient world and now, 
with sublime irrelevance, Christianity 
preaches Christ crucified, — to them that 
are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ 
the power of God and the wisdom of God. 

For this religion which the despair, or 
the self-confidence, of youth imagines it has 
no use for, is not a science to explore the 
physical world in regions where biology 
has been unable to enter ; nor a philosophy 
which harmonizes the gathered knowledge 
of the world. Undoubtedly religion is in- 
timately connected with science and with 
philosophy. Undoubtedly it must accom- 
modate itself to the language of science 
and of philosophy. But Religion is some- 
thing different from this. Religion does 
not contradict knowledge. It has no an- 
swer to that last pitiful question of First 
Cause. Whatever may be tested and tried 
by w^eight or measurement or sense experi- 
ence is the field of science. Religion has 
no added delicacy of touch which enables 
it to take up the weights and measures and 



130 The Things That Abide 

microscopes of physical science and reach 
more accurate results. Nor is it impelled 
to this search; for if God was ever any- 
where present in the phenomena of life, he 
must be always and everywhere present — 
'^in whom we live and move and have our 
being. ' ' 

Of St. PauPs intellectual greatness and 
dialectical skill we have abundant proof. 
When he entered the lists to answer direct- 
ly and philosophically the niaterialism of 
the Greek and the skepticism of the Jew, 
he was no mean debater. To him Christian- 
ity satisfied every test of reason. To him, 
certainly, it lacked none of those signs for 
which the Jew might reasonably inquire. 
But Paul could not afford to risk the mes- 
sage of Christianity on a philosophical or 
theological solution of the problems which 
Greek and Jew had raised. Logic has no 
power to touch the springs of life, and no 
real doubt was ever laid by an appeal to 
experiences which have no present continu- 
ance. Paul could afford to seem a stum- 
bling-block to the Jew and foolishness to 
the Greek because he saw Christianity in 
far different aspect. It could not be appre- 
hended from the point of view of Jew or 
Greek. Christianity was something differ- 



The Christian Argument 131 

ent from that which the Greek had re- 
jected, something different from that which 
the Jew was seeking to prove. Christian- 
ity was a life, a principle of action, a rela- 
tion between God and man. If he conld 
see this life building into the awful serious- 
ness of the Jew, working in and moulding 
the genuine sincerity and artistic quick- 
ness of the Greek, he need not trouble him- 
self about their philosophy. The Jew's 
question would answer itself. The power 
of God would be manifested in his own life. 
The Greek need not be diverted from his 
noble pursuit of wisdom. His cold and 
cheerless search needed but the touch of 
faith, the unifying purpose of the larger 
life, to reach it up till the Greek himself 
should see, in its transfigured light, the 
wisdom of God. 

Philosophy is only man 's explanation of 
things. Christian philosophy is only a 
Christian man's explanation of things. It 
is colored with all the conceptions of the 
age which produces it. It is Nicene or anti- 
Nicene according to the intellectual hered- 
ity, training, and associations of those who 
proposed it. It is now bedded in Ptolemaic 
astronomy, now in Copernican. In the 
eighteenth century it will hold to separate 



132 The Things That Abide 

and special creation; in the nineteenth it 
must follow the great evolutionary cleav- 
age. The readjustment of philosophy, es- 
pecially of religious philosophy, is always 
painful. It was so in the sixteenth century, 
it will be so in the twentieth. But inevi- 
table and painful though it may be, it deals 
only with the adventitious. The Gospel 
message is the same whether philosophy be 
Ptolemaic or Copernican, fiat or evolution- 
ary. Christian philosophy is always chan- 
ging, and must always change, so long as 
anything concerning this world of ours re- 
mains to be discovered. But the essence 
of Christianity is unchangeable. And so 
St. Paul with unerring insight ignores the 
doubt of the Jew and the unbelief of the 
Greek, and lays down the Christian pro- 
gramme. Christianity does not assume to 
solve any of the problems which are as old 
as human life, except as the unfolding 
nature grows into the unity, the harmony, 
the beauty of the divine life. The Bible 
never anywhere argues the existence of 
God; Christianity never anywhere presup- 
poses assent to a theology. ^^ Follow me," 
'^Come unto me," ^^Take up your cross" 
— these were Christ's test. What gives 
Christianity its vitality, and what makes 



The Christian Argument 133 

Christian the largest word in the language, 
is this fundamental call to life and service. 
We do not yield allegiance to Jesus be- 
cause of his authoritative manner of speech. 
This were to confuse effect with cause. He 
spoke with sublime authority because life 
had yielded to him its everlasting meaning. 
He who searches the Gospels for proof- 
texts may find support for almost any sys- 
tem. He who sees nothing more in his 
Bible than historical data and an ethical 
syllabus has missed its import. Jesus' mes- 
sage was bound up with bis personality^ 
because the life was the message. He 
asserted the sonship. He dared to reach 
up and claim the high prerogative of Son 
of God. His nature found no repulse, he 
stood on this height one with God in pur- 
pose and fellowship. What he said seemed 
of little account; it never occurred to him 
to write it down. He put himself at the 
head of no movement. He did not seek the 
great centers that from their vantage- 
ground his power and influence might be 
augmented. What he did was mainly inci- 
dental. As he went about he did the god- 
like things — the simple deeds of service — 
and spoke the discourse of the spirit. 
Twelve men became his companions, and 



134 The Things That Abide 

upon them he poured out the wealth of his 
nature. To them he opened the secrets of 
life and called them to his height. One 
failed him; the others responded in some 
fashion to that inspiring touch. Jesus 
looked to see the whole world transformed 
and human life everywhere made divine 
through this power of love and service. In 
a way the world has responded. In fair 
and generous measure a multitude of lives 
have attained the sonship to which Jesus 
called them. Yet now, after the lapse of 
nearly nineteen hundred years, when we 
measure any of these against the command- 
ing figure of Christ, we do not need any 
one to tell us why Jesus occupies a unique 
and undisputed place in the world. 

Paul preached Christ crucified because 
he must turn men's thoughts from phil- 
osophy to life. Here was- One who shared 
our common life in common ways of love 
and service. Yet in that life and service 
was that which the Jew so despairingly 
sought — not some ability to wreck the or- 
dinary laws and processes of nature, which 
the Jew of Galilee and of Stanford seems 
to think would be proof of Divinity; not 
some opening of the heavens which should 
disclose a superhuman God and angels on 



The Christian Argument 135 

the other side of the sky ; not the subtle- 
ties of an ethical philosophy which arrives 
by slow gradations at the greatest good of 
the greatest number — ^but that larger unity 
and purpose which reaches up to the 
Fatherhood of God through the brother- 
hood of man. To the Greek who cannot 
believe in God because he knows so much, 
because he sees that everything which men 
call God can be resolved into a manifesta- 
tion of force, because the gods are mere 
imaginings to account for what cannot be 
understood, Paul is content to preach this 
foolishness of one who in life and in death 
freely gave himself a ransom for many; 
not caring what name he might be called, 
if love, and penitence, and forgiveness, and 
the joy of service bring its regenerating 
touch; yet confident that, in the end, it 
would spell out, to the Greek himself, the 
wisdom and the love of God. 

Light and immortality have been brought 
to light through the Gospel. Immortality 
came to light, not because Jesus died and 
then returned from out the grave to resume 
the old familiar comradeship. Whatever 
that mysterious and uplifting experience 
which came to the disciples after Calvary 
Jesus did not take up again the daily round 



136 The Things That Abide 

of life, nor did he discourse of what he had 
found beyond the veil. The earthly life 
was cut off forever, and no curious word 
was spoken of w^hat goes on in that silent 
land. Not so could immortality be brought 
to light. We cannot live, nor behold the 
light of immortality through the record of 
any past event. Life is an experience of 
our own. We live it or we do not have it. 
Immortality came to light in Jesus through 
that unerring spiritual instinct, that in- 
sight into the eternity of life, which is 
shared to us through his winsome and over- 
mastering personality. He saw life in its 
largest meaning, its inter-relation with the 
unending purpose of God. Every relation 
of this life had its immortal aspect. He 
lived the immortal life, and death could be 
only an incident, however profound or sig- 
nificant. 

*'God giveth and forgiveth without the 
asking,'' just as the rain falls alike upon 
the just and the unjust. Yet in a very true 
sense there can be no receiving un- 
less there is first the asking. Asking is 
the consciousness of need, the necessary 
quality of receptiveness, the essential con- 
dition of receiving. If one does not listen 
for the Divine voice he surely will not hear 



The Christian Argument 137 

it. The penalty for disuse of organ or 
power is loss of organ or power. Is the 
religious life so unreal that environment is 
of no importance? Nay, environment is of 
the greatest importance. It is well enough 
to feel our independence of services, ordi- 
nances, formal modes of worship and fel- 
lowship. Yet certain it is that the religious 
life, unless it is exercised, attended by ade- 
quate expression, has no more guarantee of 
continuance than any other attribute. 
There are those who find in the high con- 
verse of poetry, in quiet communion with 
the great thoughts of the ages, in famili- 
arity with the intimate retreats and secrets 
of nature, in unselfish pursuit of a noble 
task, this stimulus to the religious life. 
Paltry the lot of any who has not felt these 
high ministrations. Christianity can have 
no quarrel with any who have walked and 
talked with God and called him by some 
other name. There are those to whom the 
Church seems but the outgrown type of a 
higher social order. One hears brave words 
about the intellectual necessity of break- 
ing away from the church whose creed you 
have outrun, of the common honesty of 
coming out and showing your colors. When 
the great historic Church becomes nothing 



138 The Things That Abide 

but a form of words, an intellectual 
formula, you may well heed this advice. 
But what if back of all intellectualisms 
there is the stirring and fragrant history 
of a great organization charged with the 
promulgation of the Kingdom of God and 
the uplifting of Humanity — an organiza- 
tion whose traditions, whose treasured ex- 
periences, whose solemn services and asso- 
ciations, whose splendid loyalty, fit it to be 
the special guardian and conservor of the 
religious life! Millions of men have lived, 
and never two of exactly the same mind. 
Yet millions have had the same ideals and 
have looked toward the same heights. How 
have these millions worked together? By 
keeping their eyes on the heights. It is no 
mark of greatness to isolate one's self so 
completely that it is impossible to join 
hands with anybody. Occasionally a great 
soul is so far in advance as to be shrouded 
in sorrowful loneliness. But this is rarely 
so. Most solitary souls are so because their 
eyes are withdrawn from the heights and 
cast upon the imperfections of men and 
organizations. They have time to discover 
creed differences, and to forget the one- 
ness of ideal and outlook. There is joy in 
heaven over one sinner that repenteth. 



The Christian Argument 139 

Who ever heard of exaltation among the 
angels over one righteous man turned Pres- 
byterian, or Unitarian, or Catholic, or made 
over into the semblance of any doctrinal 
system ? 

^*The fruit of the spirit is Love, Joy, 
Peace, Long-suffering, Gentleness, Good- 
ness, Faith, Meekness, Self-control : against 
such there is no law." 

^^Love is of God; and every one that 
loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. 
He that loveth not knoweth not God; for 
God is Love." 



"As Little Children" 



"As Little Children" 

''Then were there brought unto him little chil- 
dren, that he should put his hands on them and 
pray: and the disciples rebuked them. But Jesus 
said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, 
to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of 
heaven. ' ^ 

''And Jesus called a little child unto him, and 
set him in the midst of them, and said. Verily 1 
say unto you, except ye be converted, and become 
as little children, ye shall not enter into the king- 
dom of heaven.^' 

CHRISTMAS time is children's time. 
We who are not children rejoice that 
it is so. Every joy in our own life takes 
a richer coloring from its reflection in the 
happy faces of little children. Even 
though we have tasted of the fruit of the 
tree of knowledge and found it bitter, 
though disappointment has lost us the zest 
of life, though ambitions have been 
thwarted, still some gladness stirs our 
hearts as we let it all go, for the moment, 
and enter into that joyous, fresh world 
where love and trust abide and where sor- 
didness and carking care may not come. 
Blessed apotheosis of childhood! Happy 



144 The Things That Abide 

giving, and happier sharing ! In the foot- 
steps of a little child we may find our way 
once more along the briar-grown path of 
the affections. Hearts become cold may be 
warmed into life, and aspirations stifled in 
our strange, grown-up atmosphere, it may 
be, shall draw breath again. In the wake 
of childhood's spontaneity we shall take 
courage to break through conventional 
barriers and be in truth ^^ kindly affec- 
tioned one to another ' ' ; and through such 
renewal love and trust shall not wholly 
perish from our lives. 

But Christmas time is more than chil- 
dren's time. It is more than the celebra- 
tion of the birth in a manger of one who 
came to a throne in the uplifted hearts of 
Christendom. It is more than a brief abdi- 
cation in favor of children, because the 
King was once a child, to turn back again 
when the Christmas days are over, into a 
world outside of and alien to the child life. 
In the Christmas celebration a babe is ex- 
alted as a babe, and before the cradle man- 
kind finds itself in the presence of a 
renewing spirit. 

What a stretch from the folded life of 
the little child to the weather-beaten struc- 
ture of the mature life, from the depen- 



^^As Little Children" 145 

dent trust of childhood to the responsibility 
and initiative of manhood, from the ideal 
world of the untainted imagination to the 
grim reality of the battlefield ! It is a hard 
thing to be no longer young; yet youth is 
forever longing to become a man. It is the 
heights that beckon him on, and with eager- 
ness he presses forward to find out, to 
know, to invent, to experience in its full- 
ness the richness and the splendor of 
achievement. Glorious indeed is the human 
life divine unfolding toward the light, 
keyed to lofty purpose. How the glory 
dims when we blindly put away from us 
the unapproachable grace of childlikeness ! 
Ah, that we should so often look out into 
the world and into our own hearts and see 
the lofty heights obscured! Somehow the 
simplicity and the trust have vanished; 
somehow the heart has hardened. So reck- 
lessly we deal with our wonderful inheri- 
tance, so insensibly the strength and beauty 
and completeness of the ideal life fade 
away, that we will not admit any voli- 
tion. It is just a part of our sophistication, 
we insist, just the normal price for firm- 
ness of texture, wisdom, the necessary 
knowledge of good and evil, the substitu- 
tion of realities for dreams. The youth of 



146 The Things That Abide 

promise and high purpose must wake up at 
last to a world of jarring interests, rival- 
ries, unequal competitions. The things 
which expanded his soul and fired his am- 
bitions are not the prizes for which men 
strive. Their pursuit does not seem to offer 
any secure footing in a practical world. In 
politics, in business, in social life the ideal 
is folded carefully away, and scheming 
shrewdness and conformity fix the high- 
water mark of practicability. 

In religion the faded metaphors are laid 
aside. If the religious impulse persists 
God is sought through some intellectual- 
emotional experience; but when God has 
thus been found we need to be persistently 
told so, lest it should never be guessed 
through any effect upon conduct. Or, with 
the attainment of erudition, religion is 
taken out of the innocent, simple-minded- 
ness of the child trust and given over to 
daring speculation. Far out beyond the 
stars, outside the unsubstantial figments of 
time and space, in the ultimate immensities, 
the mind tries somehow to grasp a God who 
is the Universal Soul of things, the one 
only essence, of which we are a part. Or, 
in our blind numbness we seek him in some 
disordered fancy of an overstrained ner- 



^^As Little Children" 147 

vous system. We think to apprehend him 
through some abnormal acuteness of the 
physical senses, and try to satisfy the dull 
longing of an unfed heart by the unex- 
plained marvels of sub-conscious activity. 

And so we find the problem of God in- 
soluble. With all our manifold demonstra- 
tions the question, Does God exist? is 
constantly recurring. The prayer, ^^0 God, 
if there be a God — save my soul, if I have 
a soul," is, after all, about as high as the 
unaided intellect ever reaches. The God of 
our thought conception — Omnipotent, Om- 
nipresent, Omniscient — makes no speech in 
our English tongue, we do not meet him 
in the street, nor can we see anything with 
these eyes of ours despite our utmost strain- 
ing. 

^ ' The light that never was on land or 
sea'' is the constant illumination of child- 
hood. Before the veit is lifted we all live 
in the glowing land of promise where 
everything is fair and beautiful. The light 
may fade; but when child life is renewed 
in the home something of the old enchant- 
ment instinctively returns. For ourselves, 
we may aver, the glorious vision has passed 
— for us the prose of life, the commonplace, 
whether it pass for success or defeat — yet 



148 The Tilings That Abide 

all we have missed, all we meant to become 
and once believed we should attain — all this 
shall come rushing back upon us as some- 
how possible in our children — if only youth 
could be kept ! If only we could guard the 
children, if only something which is un- 
speakably precious be not lost in the pas- 
sage over to manhood, the world shall be 
transformed. In childhood the whole 
world is renewed. Judge any man by 
what he is in his home and among children. 
Moral degradation has no plainer mark 
than a failure to respect the innocence and 
the trustfulness of childhood. And there is 
no surer sign of the pure heart than in- 
stinctive reverence for childhood. Chil- 
dren do not come to every home; but it is 
inconceivable that there should be a home 
so selfish as not to want child life in it. 
* ^ To meet eyes which trust us without ques- 
tion, to receive caresses which are not 
measured by our worthiness but are the 
spontaneous fruit of a love which seeks no 
proof of our merit, cannot be a light matter 
to any man. These are a father's guerdon 
and repay many an hour of patient self- 
denial. If a man or woman finds the greed 
and false effort of his or her world are 
infecting the spirit with the lowering in- 



^^As Little Children" 149 

fluences they exert, God has left no such 
restraining power in a sinful world as the 
fear to injure a child or lose its love.'' 
Nothing more emphasizes the transitoriness 
and artificiality of this set-apart life of 
students, in barracks and boarding clubs, 
than the absence of the home sanctities and 
of the hallowing presence of little children. 
What utter loneliness there may be in a 
crowd; and what tempting spirits come to 
a house thus suddenly swept and gar- 
nished! But think you there is no saving 
quality in the memory of these things ? He 
will not go far wrong in whose heart are 
enshrined the pure affections of a home 
kept sweet and warm-hearted by the child 
life in it. 

To childhood we must turn back for the 
law of spiritual growth. Ignorance does 
not in itself prevent, knowledge does 
not in itself help or hinder spiritual 
growth : to reach out and take hold ; to put 
on; to earn faith by being faithful; to 
experience what love is by loving ; there 
is no other way. To turn from plain, 
wholesome living, in the sunshine, just 
doing the next duty, just leading the 
simple, strenuous life — to turn from this 
to abstract ratiocination, or to painful 



150 The Things That Abide 

groping in the sub-conscious, is to turn 
from warmth and light to the dank cellar 
where men like plants shall merely spindle 
out in fantastic and unsubstantial shapes. 
Some strange and marvelous harvest there 
may be, the rightful spoil of erudition and 
investigation, but not here the meeting- 
place of earth and heaven. 

To the impatient youth hurrying away 
from childhood, to the finally disillusioned 
man, the trust of childhood seems a blind 
trust, just a shutting of the eyes, the exhi- 
bition of unlimited credulity. Nothing 
could be farther from the truth. There is 
no shutting of the eyes in childhood. The 
trust of childhood is the undeceived trust: 
''The soft, deep heart of the little child 
that, having nothing, asketh for all things, 
that hath no care, no distress, no solicitude, 
and expecteth only love." The looking up 
and asking is natural. The trust is be- 
gotten by nothing but the receiving. All 
the sweet trust of childhood may be de- 
stroyed by one thoughtless deception. But 
so long as the child can say My Father, and 
receive the answering confidence, so long as 
mother-love beats in true response to child 
need, so long does trust remain to mold the 
character in all loveliness and excellence. 



'^As Little Children" 151 

Childhood possesses neither knowledge 
nor erudition. Childhood can have no 
sense of proportion or relation among 
the intricate facts of the universe. But 
the child-spirit and the child-faith are the 
spirit and the faith which preserve the sym- 
metry of life in the midst of all the dis- 
tractions and disorders of the world. 
Forever the relations of the home typify 
the relation of man to all that is kindred 
to him in the universe of God. 

Yet we know that the God and Father of 
us all, who is over all, and through all, and 
in us all, cannot be limited by time and 
space. The very highest attributes of man 
— consciousness and personality — can only 
faintly symbolize the like possession of 
him who is the Sovereign Ruler of the Uni- 
verse, Creator and Preserver of Mankind. 
And we know there can be no literal truth 
in giving him form and locality, and think- 
ing of a great room in Heaven, and a 
throne, and all of us gathered around it. 
Then must we cease to think of God as 
Father and we as children to be gathered 
sometime into his presence? No; here is 
our highest thought of him. Here, by 
means of this symbolism, where intellect 
and reason stand at bay, we pass through 



152 The Things That Abide 

to ultimate reality. Just here, in the 
simple, trustful attitude of the little child, 
just here, by pressing home the deepest 
relations of earth, just here, in this sym- 
bolism, we find that order and unity and 
meaning, that harmony and beauty, that 
unutterable love whereby we instinctively 
cry Abba, Father! and doubt not of the 
response. 

What is the strongest characteristic of 
the wisest man? Not his craft, not his 
logic, not his towering knowledge. It is his 
directness, his simplicity, his childlikeness. 
the men who live behind masks, to whom 
diplomacy and duplicity seem so great 
weapons, who flatter, and cajole, and con- 
trive! How far are they from the real 
heart of things, from real strength, from 
real wisdom ! And how, after all, the world 
loves and appreciates outspokenness ! 

And so the lesson is and the sweet mes- 
sage is, that we can become as little chil- 
dren in things of the spirit. Youth can be 
renewed in our sluggish blood. The hard- 
ened heart may be softened. The zest of 
life, the simplicity and trust, these were 
not forever lost as we climbed the sordid 
years this side the eating of the tree of 
the knowledge of good and evil. Except 



^^As Little Children" 153 

we be converted and become, as little chil- 
dren? Blessed, thrice blessed, are we that 
we can become as little children, that the 
tortuous windings may be unwound, that 
the simplicities and the trust are real, that 
the spiritual life is just this life touched 
with illumination, that something that 
belongs to childhood may perennially 
freshen our days, that in the real things of 
life we may never grow old. 

And so to this babe in the manger Hu- 
manity turns and sees reflected the vision 
and the fullness of God. The Christmas 
vision is the revelation of permanent truth. 
The things eternally truest in our own 
lives cannot be less true anywhere in the 
vast eternity of God. Jesus took little chil- 
dren in his arms and blessed them and 
made them the everlasting type of disciple- 
ship. How long a perverse world stumbled 
over the plainest of truths ! But childhood 
is coming to its own ; its benediction is that 
the mood of despairing doubt and home- 
lessness shall give place to understanding 
trust and the peace of the reunited home 
— not less real that it passeth all under- 
standing. 



" Like as a Father " 



"Like as a Father" 

''Like as a father pitieth his children, so the 
Lord pitieth them that fear him." 

IIFE is our adventure into the iin- 
^ known. It is the supreme quest ; and 
no travelers' tales which reach us can dull 
the keen edge of our own experiences or 
discoveries. On this voyaging we can go 
but a little way before meeting with contra- 
dictions. "We shall find joy and sorrow, 
pleasure and pain, triumphs and despairs, 
heights and depths. In this encounter with 
the world of experience we are not mere 
inert passengers. It is a real encounter; 
and how we take it, how we react upon it, 
how we direct it, is of vast importance. If 
we were passive spectators, and if the spec- 
tacle would be the same whatever our efforts 
and conduct, if a blind fate were driving 
us toward a predetermined end, there might 
be interest in the voyaging and curiosity 
about the end, but there would be no sus- 
tained enthusiasm and no giving of thanks. 
But if there is a port at which we shall 



158 The Things That Abide 

arrive by virtue of our own effort and 
striving in a world fundamentally good, a 
^^ far-off, divine event, to which the whole 
creation moves," then nothing shall sub- 
due the courage and the exhilaration 
with which we turn to meet whatever be- 
fall us. 

Is the world fundamentally good, or bad ? 
A part of the evidence is our own indi- 
vidual experience — ^what happens to us; a 
part is the experience of the race. But 
there is no final answer without a synthesis 
of that which lies behind time and space 
and every outpost of the human mind. 
There is no reflecting mind w^hich does not 
try to make this synthesis, to construct, 
in terms of experience, a symbol of that 
ultimate reality which is at the heart 
of the universe and which we have called 
God. 

The line of our own spiritual descent is 
through the race which has given to the 
world the loftiest conception of God and of 
the destiny of man. Yet some of the most 
terrible conceptions of God are found in 
the Bible. Those which reflect merely a 
rudimentary stage of civilization, in which 
cunning and cruelty suggest no inconsis- 
tency, we need not dwell upon. Even in 



^^Like as a Father" 159 

them the spiritual genius of the Hebrew 
people is not wholly wanting. God is 
always the defender of his chosen people. 
Against their enemies he will move with 
swift and terrible fury. For the chosen 
nation there is deliverance and exaltation, 
yet through the discipline of trial and 
humiliation. Even when the passion for 
righteousness- has become dominant he is 
the great and terrible God, smiting wicked- 
ness, tearing down idols, overturning king- 
doms with his breath. Prophetic language 
is symbolic and figurative. Nevertheless 
prophecy is a reflective interpretation of 
the world of experience thrown against the 
unconquerable ideal of the Hebrew race. 

But while the prophets cling to their 
great ideal and transmit it unimpaired, the 
heritage of all succeeding peoples, the 
Hebrew race can grasp it only fitfully and 
is again and again overwhelmed by the 
insistent contradictions of experience. It 
finds a world of warring forces, a world of 
bitter contrasts, a world of suffering. The 
wicked prosper, the innocent suffer, right- 
eousness must stand aside. The days of a 
man are ''few and full of trouble." 

''Never morning wore 
To evening, but some heart did break.'' 



160 The Things That Abide 

What kind of a world is this, — the world 
of breaking hearts? In a moment, in the 
twinkling of an eye, the lightning stroke 
may come and leave behind only the long, 
long ache of bereavement. 

''Why is light given to a man whose way is hid, 
And whom God hath hedged in? 
I am not at ease, neither am I quiet, 
Neither have I rest: but trouble cometh. '' 

Is it a good world which can write such 
a commentary on human life ? 

From this prison-house of despair the 
Hebrew mind could climb to one unassail- 
able height. God might be angry or jealous 
or unpropitiated ; evil passions and sorrow 
might for a time hold sway. But this was 
no eternal order : the Vindicator would ap- 
pear. Eestoration was merely delayed ; the 
Chosen People would yet be exalted. 
Modern pessimism has sunk into a deeper 
despair. There is no Vindicator. Nature 
has her genial moods, her lovable aspects. 
But she is the stern and unbending law of 
sequence; she vindicates only her own 
order. The reality outside of man does not 
regard man; it is utterly indifferent to 
him. Nature is beneficent if we go her 
way; within that range we may be light- 
hearted and love life and feel it good. But 



^^Like as a Father" 161 

if we oppose her she strikes without fear 
and without remorse. Nothing interferes 
with nature, for there is nothing to inter- 
fere with immutable law. God — that is, the 
mechanism of the universe — is concerned 
with his own affairs. ^ ' Nature red in tooth 
and claw with ravine," ^'the great glad 
earth — glad as if no child had ever died'' 
— this is our outward environment. And if 
one flees in terror from this aspect of the 
outer world to seek renewal of life in the 
commonwealth of hearts, one is met by 
the no less terrible isolation of the individ- 
ual. We meet and touch in the surface 
things, and in the depths of the soul are a 
million miles apart. How much there is 
we cannot share ! How much there is, both 
in our joy and our sorrow, of which the 
world neither knows nor cares ! 

''She came to us in storm and snow — 
The little one we held so dear— 
And all the world was full of woe, 

And war and famine plagued the year; 
And ships were wrecked, and fields were 
drowned. 
And thousands died for lack of bread; 
In such a troubled time we found 

That sweet mouth to be kissed and fed. 

'^But oh, we were a happy pair, 

Through all the war and want and woe; 
Though not a heart appeared to care, 
And no one even seemed to know. 



162 The Things That Abide 

''She left us in the blithe increase 

Of glowing fruit and ripening corn, 
When all the nations were at peace, 

And plenty held a brimming horn- 
When we at last were well to do, 

And life was sweet and earth was gay; 
In that glad time of cloudless blue 

Our little darling passed away. 

''And oh, we were a wretched pair 
In all the gladness and the glow; 
And not a heart appeared to care, 
And no one even seemed to know.'^ 

I know there is a philosophical reaction 
from the despair which seems to follow the 
pessimistic view of the universe. Things 
are not so bad after all. There is a 
bright side, and one may train himself 
to look mainly on that. In the allotted 
threescore and ten years much may be 
achieved. No matter if it makes no differ- 
ence a cycle or a million years hence: we 
take life as we find it, with a fair chance 
at its prizes. Nature may be coaxed and 
driven to do our bidding, if only we try 
patiently to learn her ways ; the fellowship 
and emulation of kindred minds will sus- 
tain and cheer us along the toilsome ascent. 
There will be pain and pleasure, but in 
seventy years we may hope to triumph over 
the pain and achieve contentment. 

Let us believe indeed that all this i^ pos- 
sible. But is it in this mood that we tune 



^^Like as a Father" 163 

our Thanksgiving anthem? Because there 
is a little bending of the scales in favor of 
the brighter side of life? because in the 
twelvemonth past, or in the twelvemonth to 
come, our gains have been, or promise to 
be, greater than our losses ? 

It was the triumph of the loftiest spiri- 
tual insight of the Hebrew people to resolve 
these grim aspects of the universe. To 
them God was lawgiver, judge, vindicator. 
But their passionate faith in the suprem- 
acy of righteousness led them on to the 
vision of God as a Father — stern indeed he 
was to them, unbending, terribly severe 
with disobedience, but kindred and not 
alien. He cared for his people. "Like as a 
father pitieth his children so the Lord 
pitieth them that fear him.'* 

In Jesus this feeling of the Fatherhood 
of God had a new and marvelous blossom- 
ing. What Jesus apprehended amounted 
to a discovery of God, a revelation. He 
was no inert observer. He saw the sad 
contrasts. He felt some of the bitterness. 
In the quiet years at the carpenter's bench, 
in the lonely days in the desert, he had 
his doubts and struggles. But of these no 
trace appears when he stands out the great 
Teacher of mankind. He adventured his 



164 The Things That Abide 

life on the principle that it is a good world 
— his Father 's world. He talked familiarly 
about God, and yet he pretended to no 
occult knowledge of Him. He had no ways 
of loiowing Him which you may not have. 
If he had been asked to prove the existence 
of God he could have offered no better log- 
ical demonstration than have hundreds of 
others, and probably with no better success 
in convincing the unwilling mind. What 
he discovered was a synthesis of life which 
explained it, which resolved its contradic- 
tory elements, which brought order out of 
chaos, which enthroned Love in the 
heavens. This synthesis was not a theory 
spun out in his head. He beheld the lilies 
of the field. He saw affection working in 
the world. He saw what became of despair 
in the crucible of faith and hope and love. 
He could see the laughter coming through 
the tears. He could see the joy encompass- 
ing the sorrow. Love will heal the wounds ; 
love will transform the evil. It is so be- 
cause it is God's world, and this is His 
expression of Himself. 

How did Jesus demonstrate this synthe- 
sis? Only by living it and giving his life 
for it. It will never be demonstrated in 
any other way. We who live it so im- 



^^Like as a Father" 165 

perfectly may see glimpses of what it is in 
its perfectness. It is a good world because 
human affections are the glow of it. It 
is a good world because evil, no matter how 
prevalent, is alien: in the scale of values 
evil weighs nothing. It is a good world 
because character is supreme. No one may 
doubt that the spiritual is higher than the 
animal, or that unselfishness is more comely 
than self-interest. *' Never morning wore 
to evening, but some heart did break" — 
but it is not the broken heart that is sig- 
nificant. It is the healing that is signifi- 
cant — the healing that goes out from a good 
world. ''To bind up the broken-hearted 'M 
the mystery of pain — ^but the greater 
mystery of its absorption! It is not Time 
that heals : it is the good world — its warmth 
and tenderness, its abundant life that f ail- 
eth not. To the woman bearing the dead 
babe Buddha could only say, ''Look around 
you and see how many others suffer a like 
affliction." But healing comes only as one 
enters into the gladness which, after all, 
fills the world. It is not cruelty or indiffer- 
ence that "the great, glad earth is glad as 
if no child had ever died. " It is the pledge 
that after all, and in spite of all, life is 
livable and joyous. The sunshine will fall 



166 The Things That Abide 

upon us till we cannot but heed. When 
the first dull feeling of surprise has worn 
away we shall rejoice that ''the great, glad 
earth'' could not be changed or swerved 
aside by our little griefs. Because it is a 
world loving and fine the clouds will melt 
away. The good world's elixir is its un- 
bounded cheerfulness, the bursting of leaf 
and fiower, the flooding sunshine, the im- 
perturbable calm of loving hearts. 

'^I too have come through wintry terrors,— yea, 
Through tempest and through cataclysm of soul 
Have come, and am delivered. Me the Spring, 
Me also, dimly with new life hath touched. 
And with regenerate hope, the salt of life; 
And I would dedicate these thankful tears 
To whatsoever Power beneficent, 
Veiled though his countenance, undivulged his 

thought. 
Hath led me from the haunted darkness forth 
Into the gracious air and vernal morn, 
And suffers me to know my spirit a note 
Of this great chorus, one with bird and stream 
And voiceful mountain,— nay, a string, how 

jarred 
And all but broken! of that lyre of life 
Whereon himself, the master harp-player, 
Eesolving all its mortal dissonance 
To one immortal and most perfect strain. 
Harps without pause, building with song the 

world. ^ ' 

It is this world of song that we are try- 
ing to put into our Thanksgiving this morn- 
ing. Shall we do it, for our country, by 
picking out her triumphs and not remem- 



"Like as a Father" 167 

bering her defeats ? for ourselves, by dwell- 
ing only on the pleasure and forgetting the 
pain? Or shall we rise to some heroic 
height and offer thanksgiving for all that 
has befallen us, the evil and the good, the 
joy and the sorrow ? Eather let us be thank- 
ful that joy remaineth ; not that there is an 
alternation of joy and sorrow, but that joy 
is permanent. After pain there cometh 
joy — not in alternation, but as the unsup- 
pressible reality. 

The isolation is only seeming. A world 
in which goodness may root and send forth 
its undying fragrance, in which the cup 
of cold water is always passing, out of 
which the barbarian and the brute are 
dying, is not a homeless world. It is our 
Father 's house. If we do not talk so freely 
and frankly about it as Jesus did perhaps 
it is because the beautiful symbolism has 
been covered over by an unlovely literalism. 
It is days like this when we break through 
the crust. In the warmth of human affec- 
tions, in the joy of that forward look which 
lifts us above every contradiction, we may 
speak the gratitude of children over whom 
bends both the seen and the unseen '4ike 
as a Father.'' 



The Life Eternal 



The Life Eternal 

**And a certain ruler asked him, saying, Good 
Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? 
And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me 
good? None is good save one, even God. Thou 
knowest the commandments: Do not commit 
adultery, Do not kill. Do not steal. Do not bear 
false witness. Honor thy father and mother. And 
he said. All these things have I observed from my 
youth up. And Jesus looking upon him loved him, 
and said unto him. One tMng thou lackest: go 
sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, 
and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come, 
follow me. But when the young man heard the 
saying he went away sorrowful; for he had great 
possessions. ' ' 

THIS young ruler did not come to Jesus 
because he lacked anything. His 
lines had fallen in pleasant places. He had 
great possessions. He kept the command- 
ments. There was in his life the thrill of 
being looked up to and obeyed; he could 
feel that he was meeting, in some adequate 
way, the responsibilities and opportunities 
that had come to him. Jesus looking upon 
him loved him. 

There was one thing that troubled him. 
This pleasant, satisfying life must come to 



172 The Things That Abide 

an end. Somewhere Death stood across his 
path, the most insistent fact in life. But 
beyond death there was the possibility of 
continued life — life restored, eternal life. 
How could that eternal life be assured? 
Let the conditions be made out, and he 
believed himself ready to meet whatever of 
tithes, of almsgiving, of fastings and 
prayer they might imply. There w^as no 
theological legalism he would not under- 
take to satisfy if only there could be assur- 
ance of the continued life of unalloyed rich- 
ness and promise. Jesus was a Master in 
Israel. Would he have aught to suggest, 
any omitted action to call to mind, which 
when performed, would render that future 
more certain ? ' ' Good Master, what must I 
do to inherit eternal life?" 

When the answer was given him he 
turned away sorrowful. If Jesus spoke 
wisely he had put his finger upon some 
flaw in this young man's thought of life. 
Possibly the young man looked only for an 
assurance that he had done all that the law 
required, and that his parcel of eternal life 
was carefully labeled and laid away to be 
called for at heaven's gate. At any rate, 
he had not thought of any remodeling of 
this life. He was disappointed not to re- 



The Life Eternal 173 

ceive commendation for his modest self- 
abasement, his solicitous care to leave noth- 
ing undone. His pride and self-esteem 
were hurt by a reply which gave so little 
weight to an upright life, to the punctil- 
ious attention to every religious command 
and convention. What value would there 
be to a life continued, made eternal, out of 
which had been taken all that rendered it 
attractive ? a continuation obtained at such 
cost that this present life must be despised, 
counted as nothing, given up ? 

How completely this interpretation of 
Jesus' attitude toward this present world 
came to be assumed by historic Christian- 
ity; and with what elaboration of detail 
and emphasis it has dwelt upon the con- 
trast between this life and the life eternal. 
As the present life was emptied, as it 
seemed to become more worthless, the 
future life was exalted. To the theological 
generations that succeeded it seemed that 
Jesus merely asked this young ruler to give 
up the brief, hurtful pleasures of a worldly 
life for the sake of everlasting joy and 
felicity. Nor was it merely the prize of 
eternal life which urged to renunciation. 
Existence could not cease. Over against 
Heaven was its counterpart Hell. The one 



174 The Things That Abide 

was to be bargained for; escape from the 
other to be purchased. Dangers beset the 
Christian on every hand. This world was 
the devil's world; the pleasures of this 
present life his most dangerous weapons. 
Everything of earthly value must be re- 
nounced. The life eternal was as different 
as possible from this present life. Here 
there should be tears, struggles, weariness, 
renunciation; there eternal joy and felicity. 
Here was bitterness, defeat, disease, death ; 
there sweetness, triumph, untroubled life. 
It is not necessary to recall all the ways 
in which the imagination of man has played 
around this mystery of the life beyond 
death. The strange theologies which have 
come out of this supposed teaching of Jesus 
present us a world busy with the desper- 
ateness, the despair, of doomed men. Men 
of exalted religious emotion fled from the 
natural life of the world as from a pest- 
house. In dens and caves, in lonely hermit- 
ages, in the rigid seclusion and rigid 
discipline of the monastery they sought to 
escape an evil world, wear out the despised 
and degraded body, and win the prize of 
eternal life held out beyond the grave. Men 
of philosophic mind, speculating upon the 
divine nature, worked into the simple mes- 



The Life Eternal 175 

sage of Jesus the intricate subtleties of 
Greek metaphysics and superimposed upon 
Christianity the lifeless legalism of eccle- 
siasticism. The intellectual characteristic 
of this age of faith was its intimate knowl- 
edge of the divine mind. It explained the 
cosmogony of Heaven; it codified the 
Divine decrees. There was no part of the 
plans and purposes of God it did not pro- 
fess to understand. Variance enough there 
was upon particular points, but no sect or 
party would admit that theology was other 
than an exact science. And if it did not 
presume to so complete a knowledge of the 
natural world, yet it turned to revelation 
as equally authoritative wherever the word 
of Scripture touched upon physical facts. 
There was indeed another aspect to this 
Age of Faith, and it would be a capital 
error not to render homage to the lives and 
achievements which honored it and which 
have permanently enriched mankind. 
There were hair-splitting literalists in 
plenty who darkened counsel and fettered 
the free human spirit, who shut God away 
from man, and barred approach except 
through the complicated etiquette of a mon- 
archical establishment and in the abject 
abasement of a court servitor. There were 



176 The Things That Abide 

perverted ascetics like St. Simeon Stylites, 
relentlessly destroying that which he was 
at such pains to preserve. But there were 
also men of tender piety and resourceful 
courage, heroic spirits like St. Francis of 
Assisi, St. Vincent de Paul, and the long 
succession of devoted missionaries who 
carried the cross and the Christian virtues 
into every dark corner of the earth. 

But at last, in the fullness of time, man- 
kind waked from this imagery of the 
charnel house, from prolonged contempla- 
tion of a lost world, as from a shuddering 
dream. All knowledge had been shut up 
in, and all progress barred by, the word of 
Scripture and the tradition of philosophy. 
The human spirit burst these barriers. 
After long wandering among the illimit- 
able spaces of speculation the wearied mind 
of man came back to a face-to-face ac- 
quaintance with the next-to-hand world. 
The symbol of reality shifted from 
noumena to phenomena. Out of the facts 
of every-day life and observation, out of 
the remains of the past, there has been 
wrought out the story of a world whose 
richness, whose teeming life, whose prob- 
lems and possibilities engage the eager pur- 
suit, the high ambitions, the loyal service 



The Life Eternal 177 

of the noblest types of men. Reluctantly 
at first, but finally and unreservedly reli- 
gion has come to share this new method and 
spirit and its view of the dignity and the 
nobility of human life. It is God's world, 
and not the devil's. The unnatural, ex- 
aggerated emphasis has been taken off the 
life beyond death. The richness, variety, 
and fascination of life in the world, and 
among the concerns of earth, has been re- 
asserted and rediscovered. Trackless 
plains and inaccessible mountains have 
beckoned to the adventurous spirit and 
fanned to white heat the enthusiasm for 
knowledge and discovery. Laboratories 
and libraries have given absorbing zest to 
the quietest of lives. The beautiful in 
nature and in art has renewed its appeal 
to the esthetic side of life, exalting the 
imagination and purifying the emotions. 
Wholesome child life has had its renais- 
sance. Education and industrial freedom 
have brought the possibilities of largeness 
and richness of life to every door. All this 
religion has accepted, is helping to bring 
about, and through it all is working 
toward moral betterment. Science and 
religion make common cause for the mate- 
rial, social, and moral progress of the 



178 The Things That Abide 

world. To the missionary the medicine- 
chest is as indispensable as the Bible. 
Problems of civic reform and of labor and 
capital are of vital concern not less to reli- 
gion than to the State. 

But the story is not all told. When the 
old sharp contrast between the two worlds 
had been destroyed, when something like 
the true emphasis had been restored to the 
life that now is, when at last religion 
would seem to be entering upon its undis- 
puted inheritance, suddenly it is found, so 
far as a great body of trained and thought- 
ful workers is concerned, that the sense of 
reality regarding a God and Father and 
life beyond death is slipping away. 

The conception of a life that goes on 
after all that we know of life has fled and 
turned to dust came at first only in dim 
and vague suggestion. All that could be 
grasped of it was shadowy and gloomy, a 
thing of dread and not desire. Christian- 
ity did not bring this thought into the 
world ; but it was Christianity that lifted it 
out of its gloom and made it a glad cer- 
tainty in the lives of unnumbered millions, 
that has taken the sting out of death and 
robbed the grave of its victory, that has 
enabled ordinary human clay — such as we 



The Life Eternal 179 

are — to face, not merely with courage, but 
joyously, weakness, failure, misunderstand- 
ing, misfortune, pain, and death, that has 
rescued old age from despair and crowned 
it with the halo of serene trust. Christian- 
ity exaggerated, dogmatic theology grossly 
libeled, a fair and beautiful world. The 
exaggeration has been corrected. The 
world has been redeemed to the uses and 
delights of man. Is this enough? Can this 
make up in the lives of men for the loss of 
that hope which has been of such incon- 
ceivable significance in the redemption and 
ennobling of human life? What has the 
religion of Jesus to say to this recession of 
the other world, to this agnostic stoicism 
within the limits of human knowledge? 
Was there anything in the message of Jesus 
which transcends these limits? Did Jesus 
carry our meagre knowledge to a higher 
degree of certainty ? Did he know more of 
phenomena than we do? Was there some 
special communicating medium whereby 
the difficulties of comprehension and un- 
derstanding which honestly and inex- 
tricably confuse the scientist and meta- 
physician were surmounted by him? 

The men of earlier centuries talked learn- 
edly of God's ways and thoughts. They 



180 The Things That Abide 

never doubted the possibility of knowing 
these things. They were in part revealed 
in Scripture, in part deduced by the facul- 
ties of the human mind, and reinforced 
from time to time by observed supernormal 
phenomena. The modern man of scientific 
training is not so sure of his knowledge. 
He knows some phenomena. He knows of 
some force. He knows of some succession 
of events which seems sometimes like intel- 
ligence and plan. He knows of certain 
surviving conventions which men distin- 
guish as right and wrong. What does he 
know, w^hat can he know, of any such being 
as a God must be ? How can individual con- 
sciousness survive the dissolution of the 
brain, and if it may do so, how can he 
know it? By revelation and supernormal 
phenomena? But who accredits these? 
Much that God was formerly said to do is 
found to be the regular and ordinary suc- 
cession of events. Much must be hazarded 
on the outcome of a difficult, perhaps in- 
soluble, historical problem. Much that the 
man of ecstatic vision has felt as the direct 
moving of God upon the soul, a clearer 
psychology unhesitatingly pronounces to 
be subjective states of human consciousness 
brought about in various and diverse ways. 



The Life Eternal 181 

From the standpoint of one who is building 
up his knowledge, step by step, through all 
the senses and the logical powers which 
have been given him, is it inevitable or 
natural that he should postulate God as 
the explanation of any yet unassimilated 
facts? Does he need any such hypothesis? 
Is there any evidence, such as an inquiring 
mind may test, of a personal consciousness 
persisting beyond the grave? He may be 
willing to retain the term God as a con- 
venient metaphor to sum up all of force 
and mystery there is in the universe : pan- 
theism is perhaps more expressive than 
materialism. But he wants to be honest 
with himself and acknowledge how little 
he may predicate of this eternal and omni- 
present, but unknowable, energy. 

Is this a man of straw? Or have we 
touched upon the insistent attitude toward 
which, freed from theological shackles, the 
quiet thinking of those who deal with 
knowledge at first hand has seemed to be 
tending? Uncontroversial for the most 
part, veiled still in religious imagery, try- 
ing to hold on to Christian ethics while 
letting theology go, there is nothing yet to 
indicate what tremendous bearing the 
naked possession of this attitude of mind 



182 The Things That Abide 

must have upon the fortunes of mankind. 
Whatever its bearing, if true, so best, af- 
firms the scientific spirit; though it also 
denies, with positive emphasis, that human 
life is thereby emptied of its nobility, its 
high endeavor, its incentive to moral excel- 
lence. Birth, growth, maturity, decay, 
death — the cycle of all that we know as 
existence. These are physical processes — 
inevitable, congenial, fulfilling. Growth 
and maturity are wide stretches. They 
comprehend the play of affection, the spur 
of ambition, the joy of comradeship, the 
exultant glow of achievement. Even over 
temporary unsuccess and failure Hope 
seldom fails to spread the purple glow af 
future achievement. 

**Has man no second life?— 
Pitch this one high ! ' ' 

To this highest height of stoicism, to this 
mountain peak of conduct, courageous souls 
may climb, and in quietness, if without en- 
thusiasm, meet the responsibilities of life, 
and face with calmness the inevitable end, 
sustained by the modest dream of joining 

**The choir invisible 
Of those immortal dead who live again 
In minds made better by their presence.'' 



The Life Eternal 183 

Stoicism sits lightly upon youth. 

" * Something in the sense of the morning 
Lifts the heart up to the sun.' 
In our youth we may be pagan, 
God is many, and the One 
Great Supreme will wait till evening 
When our little day is done: 
Something in the sense of morning 
Lifts the heart up to the sun ! ' ' 

Stoicism is sublime in many of its 
aspects. It is courageous. It is better 
than many an opposing medley. But no 
such chill, though grand, conception has 
swept the keys of the human heart through 
the ages. Another thought has brought 
peace in the hour of sore assailment, an- 
other faith has given the tenderest types of 
the human spirit — the thought and the 
faith that death and decay are not of the 
spirit. 

The message of Jesus was so simple, so 
transparent, so straightforward that it was 
at once and persistently misunderstood. 
Forever the attempt has been to garb it in 
the language of mystery. Caught up into 
the realm of metaphysical speculation, it 
seemed to the theological mind that Jesus 
had revealed God through logical processes 
and logical relations, and that his physical 
senses had apprehended another world and 



184 The Things That Abide 

the God who presides over it in a way not 
open to other men. Whatever be the fate 
of our supposed knowledge of spiritual 
realities, we may boldly affirm that it does 
not stand or fall by these criteria of the 
theologians. Jesus knew less of phenom- 
ena than you or I. He did not blaze any 
new way through metaphysical difficulties ; 
he did not even concern himself with these 
difficulties. Jesus looked out upon human 
life as it went on about him in Galilee and 
Jerusalem. He saw the passion and the 
tragedy, the heights and depths, the possi- 
bilities. Behind it all, the explanation of 
all, he named God. The age-long ripening 
of Jewish thought had found its fruition 
in this conception. But he went beyond 
the contradictory notions through which 
his race had struggled and by which it was 
still beset. By that superlative spiritual 
insight which accredits itself, by that 
supreme intuition which is the birthright 
of the creative spirit, he pierced the mys- 
teries of this omnipresent force, this cosmic 
order, and beheld the God and Father 
which upholds it and the Love which is its 
resolving, binding force. Jesus organized 
the realities of the life of the spirit. He 
saw relations, moral values. He inter- 



The Life Eternal 185 

preted the spiritual aspect of the world. 
The hopes, the aspirations, the longings, 
the better self — these were the instruments 
of the Divine unfolding, of that Divine 
nature which supremely expresses itself in 
Love. Through the loving heart, through 
the aspiring soul, through obedience to the 
highest, the Divine took hold of the human 
and lifted it into sonship. 

Because Jesus spoke familiarly of God 
an obtuse theology imagined he had some 
occult knowledge we cannot possess. Be- 
cause he had no doubt, now or anytime, 
here or anywhere, of the presence of the 
living God it was assumed that his assur- 
ance must be based on a technical knowl- 
edge of existence beyond the grave, that 
there had been revealed to him through 
supernormal processes a knowledge of that 
other world for which the sufficient testi- 
mony forever afterward is his recorded 
word. 

Jesus was sure not because he could see 
through the tangle of metaphysics, not 
because he could solve the logical diffi- 
culties of the problem of knowledge, 
not because he could comprehend the 
mysteries of ganglion cells or peep 
over the rim of an inconceivably distinct 



186 The Things That Abide 

world. These were not the problems of his 
time ; they did not trouble him at all ; they 
were not present to his consciousness. 
Jesus was a Hebrew teacher. He was born, 
and he lived, in an atmosphere surcharged 
with the idea of God. He never doubted 
that God existed. Jesus had the sublime 
audacity, characteristic of his race, to 
believe that God could speak to men — 
directly, revealingly. And behind that 
audacity was the supremest spiritual in- 
sight the world has ever known. For him 
there was needed no unveiling of Flaming 
Bush, of Whirlwind Voice, of Pillar of 
Cloud. He did not require for his own 
unclouded vision that one had risen from 
the dead. For him was 

''Earth crammed with Heaven, 
And every common bush afire with God.'' 

God the Father the explanation of the 
order and symmetry and eternal call to 
righteousness; Sonship the explanation of 
the aspirations, the hopes, the upward 
striving of men; Love the resolving, unit- 
ing force. Out into the world Jesus flung 
this conception. The mystery of life — all 
that lies beyond mediate and immediate 
perception, that which explains it^ that 
which gives it meaning, that which expands 



The Life Eternal 187 

it — is God; not revealing himself as im- 
personal force, unknowable energy, but as 
our Father, touching the personal, the 
upward-striving, the divine in us. He did 
not pretend to any sibylline revelation. 
He gave no details of an existence beyond 
the grave which transcends finite expe- 
rience and imagination. To him life was 
in the Father — abiding as the Father 
abode. He had sounded the depths of spir- 
itual being, and so he spoke with the utmost 
confidence ; but beyond this he was modest 
and not curious. 

Jesus did not condemn the young ruler 
because he thought too much of this pres- 
ent world and not enough of the world to 
come. It was this present world that Jesus 
wanted to redeem. The tears to be 
quenched were here and now. The desert 
places to be made to bloom were desert 
places in the earth under our feet. The 
hope to be put into hopeless lives was for 
the men and women bent upon the common 
task of living. Jesus opened a way to 
transform human lives. He interpreted to 
the world a resolving force which should 
redeem human life, making it intelligent, 
free, strenuous, loving, unfolding, beauti- 
ful. Jesus saw the hardness and the cal- 



188 The Things That Abide 

CTilating selfishness in the life of the young 
ruler, who wanted eternal life only when 
this life had failed and ceased to be. Jesus 
offered him eternal life here and now — no 
affair of diplomatic adjustment between 
the individual and God, no paid-up policy 
in exchange for few or many pains or pen- 
ances here, but a rebirth of the soul, an 
ennobled purpose, the ecstasy and the en- 
thusiasm of self-forgetting service, the 
radiant vision of the pure in heart, the 
building up ever toward and into a life of 
eternal significance. 

In spite of misunderstandings and fail- 
ures, in spite of blindness, perversity, 
insincerity, weakness, we know that 
Jesus did not deceive the world. We 
know that human life has been and 
can be raised to that sonship which he pro- 
claimed.' "We know that the peace of God 
shall crown him who orders his life after 
the pattern of Jesus Christ. We know 
that God can be known, and that the 
eternal bond of union v^ith him can be 
manifest in a human life. ^^This is life 
eternal that they might know thee the 
only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou 
hast sent." 

Yet the question must recur, ^^If a man 



The Life Eternal 189 

die shall he live again'' — the same con- 
scious personality that inhabited the earth? 
When life is at the full, with a song in the 
heart, how dim and far away and im- 
personal Death seems. But nearing the 
end, or overwhelmed by the swift, blinding 
stroke that carries beyond our ken the well- 
beloved, how the soul must try to pierce 
the veil. If the dead live again they have 
passed out of our sight : is there any break- 
ing through the incommunicable medium 
of mortality ? 

Now it is the historical fact that here 
and there and at special times this medium 
has been broken through, that the God who 
is behind it all, and the dead who have 
passed through, have found a way to com- 
municate in some direct, individual, and 
even verbal fashion — it is this asserted fact 
on which the faith of Christendom has been 
made largely, and at times almost wholly, 
to rest. For millions who have passed 
away and for other millions who are now 
alive this demonstration has quieted and 
satisfied the insistent questioning of the 
soul. And it may be said without hesita- 
tion that the negative criticism at this 
point, which brought such doubt and con- 
fusion into our modern world, and whose 



190 The Things That Abide 

effects are so evident in the widely preva- 
lent stoicism everywhere about us, has spent 
its force. The inquiry now is, not how 
much modern science and modern criticism 
have destroyed, but how much they have 
saved — a fact which presages the dawn of 
a new constructive era in the history of 
religion. But this new constructive era 
will be conditioned, and largely shaped, by 
the positive results of modern science and 
modern criticism. It will not be content 
with those lower forms of evidence which 
satisfied the piety of the past. It will ap- 
proach the mysteries alike of life and of 
death with becoming modesty, and, walled 
in by finite limitations, will confess often 
its bafflement. It will not be satisfied to 
rest its hope of eternal life on obscure his- 
torical incidents; nor upon those inner 
states which seem psychological rather than 
theological mysteries; nor upon that newer, 
persistent evidence of the supernormal 
which, even if all is granted that is claimed, 
is so meagre, incoherent, and unilluminat- 
ive. Toward all these it will keep an open 
mind, and it will not believe that the last 
word has yet been spoken. But it will turn 
to the firmer ground of the immortal qual- 
ity which may be and has been put into 



The Life Eternal 191 

the lives of men and women on the earth, 
to the inner witness of the pure heart and 
the unselfish life, to the life and the mes- 
sage of Jesus. To get and keep that sense 
of a God and Father which suffused the 
life of Jesus, is to win the immortal height. 
The sustaining note of this faith will be 
confidence in the' spiritual integrity of 
Jesus ; and it is through this conviction that 
men will reach up to the God who ''so 
loved the world that he gave his only- 
begotten son that whosoever believeth on 
him should not perish but have everlasting 
life." In the thought and the plan of 
Jesus death made no break. Believing in 
him life will be organized on his plan. 
Because he lives we shall live also. We 
shall not pretend to understand just what 
the last great change may mean ; but more 
and more as words fail and images become 
meaningless we shall come to rest back 
upon the simple, tender symbolism of 
Jesus. 

This eternal life which shall fill the soul ! 
• — the way to it is no new or strange way. 
By prayer and service, through the up- 
ward striving, one by one men shall win 
it — the pure heart, the clear vision, the 
joyful assurance. 



192 The Things That Abide 

' * What do you think has become of the young and 
old men? 

And what do you think has become of the women 
and children? 

They are alive and well somewhere. 

The smallest sprout shows there is really no 
death, 

And if ever there was it led forward life, and 
does not wait at the end to arrest it, 

And ceas'd the moment life appeared. 

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, 

And to die is different from what any one sup- 
posed, and luckier/' 

Out of the theological mind of the past 
has come down the feeling that when life 
is ebbing from the body the soul also is 
sick unto death. As with hurried feet the 
physician is summoned so also must the 
priest be brought to minister to the soul in 
its dire extremity. It will be well indeed, 
in that inevitable hour, if our friends may 
sit beside us in cheerful ministration. But 
at the end of a life well lived the soul is 
not sick. Whether Death come after long 
vigils, or in the market place, or in dis- 
charge of the humblest duty, the sincere 
man faces with fearless calm whatever is 
before him. If life is pitched high enough 
— as high as Jesus believed it could be — 
there will indeed be the sorrow of parting, 
but in the forward look Death will seem as 
sweet and unobtrusive as sleep to tired 
eyes. 



The Life Eternal 193 

^'Love is and was my King and Lord 
And will be, tho' as yet I keep 
Within his court on earth, and sleep 
Encompassed by his faithful guard, 

''And hear at times a sentinel 

Who moves about from place to place, 
And whispers to the worlds of space, 
In the deep night, that all is well." 



JAN 87 1903 



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